Simultaneous work and an Agile Approach There are ways to divide the work up using an agile approach.  This can get complicated for distributed teams but for teams that are on the same site the challenge is greatly reduced. We once worked on an embedded development project for an electronic control unit on a vehicle. […]

There are limits to the decomposition, and for conventional projects where monitoring may be less routine (meaning not every day), it is in our best interest to decompose as far as possible to make answering any question about the status simple, yes or no rather than some vague estimate of completion (30% complete based upon […]

Product development work has variation brought on by the product, as well as the organization.  Though there are many approaches out there, prescriptions that are based upon the type of organization or the type of product.  These approaches may have some relevance but ultimately things are not so easy to allow a prescription, “take two […]

I have been reading some Twitter and LinkedIn post from numerous, but especially Mario Lucero, about multiple product owners, and product owners and scrum masters with multiple projects and the like.  I have not seen any studies on this, but experience tells me a significant obstacle to project success is the diffusion of the available […]

The product owner impacts the sprint set up through the business case. This person is responsible for ensuring the input to the scrum actually makes business sense, and by sense we are talking about economic sense.  The product owner is responsible for ensuring there is business value, without that, there will be no sprint.  The […]

Processes and Procedures Words mean things, and words can have many meanings. This meaning can change due to context. For example, consider if a person asks you to go to the boot of their car and retrieve their suitcase.  You can be pretty confident that there are no shoes on the wheels or hubs of […]

In Project Management One size does not fit all. Product development and project management can be very complex and complicated with variations and permutations that make a prescriptive approach impossible to produce successful results.  That goes for any brand or type of project management.  What is important is to have an arsenal of skills, tools […]

One of the benefits of agile, at least in theory, is the single product owner. In conventional projects we can have many people in the position of the product sponsor or product owner.  These multiple voices can provide contradictions in which our product development team must wade through to determine the real requirements.  Experience indicates […]

I recently had a brief twitter discussion with Mario Lucero that lead to a lengthy discussion over Skype who lives in Chile (the world is not so large).  His recent experience suggested to him that a company that employed conventional project management to not be a good candidate for agile.  My experience ran contrary to […]