Agile may be simple, but it still takes work. Often, organizations fail to adopt agile methods for similar reasons, and many of these reasons are cultural. From checkbook commitment and lack of executive support to ineffective retrospectives and bad product ownership, this e-book describes the
Chances are good that when you realize you need to scale digital project management within your agency, you’re either receiving a flood of new projects and you need to get a handle on it – or you’ve been having challenges managing your existing workload and
Team Charters Getting Your Team off to a Great Start [if IE 9]>< ![endif] Does your team know where it’s going? Working in teams can be fantastic – if team members work well together. However, if people are pulling in different directions, the experience can be
The Vroom-Yetton Decision Model Deciding How to Decide Steer your decision-making process in the right direction. How you go about making a decision can involve as many choices as the decision itself. Sometimes you have to take charge, and decide what to do on your
The Role of a Facilitator Guiding an Event Through to a Successful Conclusion So you’ve been asked to facilitate a meeting. What does that mean exactly? Do you just ensure everyone’s introduced, and maybe kick off with a quick ice breaker exercise? Is your main role simply
Rapid prototyping can be a helpful tool for us as digital project managers to help clients who ask the question; ‘But will this work?’ and ‘How will this work?’ Often the simple, but frustrating answer is simply, ‘We don’t know yet – but let us
The Ultimate Project Management Process Map a comprehensive diagram that details all of the project management components using the PMBOK® Guide Forth Edition (not 5th). The graphic is large 4083x2786px It shows: – An overview of the changes incorporated in PMBOK 4 (not 5) – All
On December 9th in a regulatory filing, Avon announced that they were writing off $125 million in software and development charges related to the rollout of their business transformation program SMT (Service Model Transformation). In the filing the company stated “SMT was piloted in Canada,
Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile Project Management If your organization is looking to realize the time, quality, and cost benefits of agile project management, this course is for you. Agile expert Kelley O’Connell helps those interested in experimenting with agile understand the difference between traditional
Agile Project Management with Microsoft Project Learn how to use Microsoft Project to manage agile projects. Author Bonnie Biafore covers setting up agile projects for success, creating custom fields to track elements unique to the agile project method, such as features and sprints, and managing
40 things you need to know about the Scaled Agile Framework® SAFe tackles the tough issues-–architecture, integration, funding, governance and roles at scale The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) provides a recipe for adopting agile at enterprise scale. It is illustrated in the big picture. A Scrum
During my Summit talk, I discussed three enterprise challenges when scaling Agile; process and documentation culture, underestimation of planning effort, and managing a complicated infrastructure. There certainly is a lot to say on all three topics! In this blog post, I would like to dive a bit deeper into
The Business Model Canvas is a strategic management and lean startup template for developing new or documenting existing business models.[1][2] It is a visual chart with elements describing a firm’s or product’s value proposition, infrastructure, customers, and finances.[3] It assists firms in aligning their activities
Comparing Agile Software Tools Agile is an exciting way to quickly deliver higher-quality products to your customer. New agile tools are emerging every day. This course helps you compare the strengths and capabilities of several different agile software tools, including Microsoft Excel, Atlassian’s JIRA, VersionOne,
Why do we write use cases? We write use cases for the same reasons that people use our software – to achieve goals. In our case, we want to assure that we are creating the right software. By looking at this high level goal in
In our article, The 8 Goals of Use Cases, the first goal is that our use cases must support requirement-completeness validation. In this article, we explore how to address this goal and how use cases can help. There are many pieces to this puzzle, and
In this article I am not going to explain what the Scale Agile Framework (SAFe) is and what Jira is. I assume you know, and if you need more information go to http://www.scaledagileframework.com and http://www.atlassian.com. But before we start, there are a few things that
One of the ten big rules of writing a good MRD is writing complete requirements. We identify problems and opportunities in the market. We determine that one of these problems is valuable enough and practical to implement. Then we have to write the requirements, and
Pragmatic Marketing has a training seminar called Requirements That Work. In support of that, they provide a list of 8 characteristics of good requirements. We change one and add two more to round it out to The Big Ten Rules. Combine this with Michael’s ten
Introduction Alistair Cockburn opened my eyes to the essence, elegance and effectiveness of use case preconditions. In [1], he discusses preconditions in just a dozen paragraphs, but these contain two statements that revolutionized my understanding of preconditions and their counterpart, postconditions. This article starts with
Agile teams typically differentiate between “epics” and “user stories.” In most cases epics are just really large stories that sit far down on your product backlog until the team is ready to flesh them out into more detail. The logical question is how to scope
I’ve been getting more and more emails lately from people confused about the difference between “user stories”, “epics” and “themes.” So I thought this month we’d return and cover some basic–but very helpful–territory by explaining those terms. moreFirst, the terms don’t matter that much. These
Are you working on your first project as a business analyst? Have you ever wondered exactly what requirements documents a business analyst creates for review by the business and technical teams? While the requirements documents created for any specific project will heavily depend on the
Introducing Agile Earned Value Metrics By Sally Tait, www.aspenware.com View Original March 12th, 2014 We use a few metrics and charts that are familiar to anyone who has worked in Scrum projects – burn down, velocity and cumulative flow. These help expose problems early on. And because
