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 […]
Project Management Tools and Risk Management There still remains meat on the bones of this study from Software Advice. On LinkedIn, Joe Hessmiller had an observation that Client relationship and Risk management was far down on the list of concerns. Under the heading More Buyers Request Advanced Functionality Than Basic[1] client management and risk management was […]
In our last blog post on project management tools, we reviewed one of the findings from a study conducted by Software Advice, in their latest report. That report stated that 60% of the prospective buyers are using manual methods[1]. We should not just disparage those companies that choose to go the manual route. Finding a […]
Why do we use tools? We use tools to make our lives better. It would not be very fun to hammer a nail into wood with our hand. Imagine the situation if we continued communicate via pony express. Sometimes, when we are not aware a tool exists, we may try to fabricate something. We make […]
Testing and Repeat-ability Repeat-ability of testing results is important to establishing cause and corrective actions. If it is not possible to repeat the sequence of events leading to a failure, it is not possible to replicate and therefore difficult solve the cause of the fault or failure. The steps that evoked the problem are necessary […]
Early Reviews Just finished reading Configuration Management: Theory, Practice and Application, and I must say this is the most comprehensive document I have ever read on the subject. It addresses theory, practice, and application, with many real-world examples of what happens when the principles of product/configuration management are not followed! —Bill Dawson, SVP […]
The Civil War It was the United States Civil war, the battle was Gettysburg. There was no doubt, General Meade had the intention to defeat Robert E. Lee. In the end General Meade was victorious and his congratulatory order to the troops was also sent by telegraph to the War Department (and would be read […]
Concurrent engineering problem take many forms From our last blog, we have learned that of an organization that has concurrent engineering difficulty, specifically coordinating the design work. We will further explore this situation. One of the subsystem groups decides to improve the coordination effort internal to that specific department. For example, System 1 chooses to […]
Once upon a time There once was a company, with a systemic problem with concurrent engineering and change management. This was a complex organization, with many functional areas. Each functional area, had sub-function divisions. This type of organizational structure is often referred to as a functional organization with the associated hierarchy. These various functional areas […]
Have you seen these risks in your projects? The project that selects a scope that does not match the constraints (cost, quality and delivery). The project strategy that dooms the organization to cost over runs, surprises the organization with late delivery that would have been easily predicted. The ineffectual risk register (or non-existing). The team […]