In project management, efficiency is everything. Projects that run like well oiled machines create high quality products and delighted stakeholders, especially the product owner. Fortunately, the Agile roles and responsibilities make it easy to create just such a project. But let's get some semantics out of the way first. Agile does not have roles as such. It is … [Read more...]
Understanding the Agile Manifesto
The agile project management revolution has transformed project management. Instead of the fully planned and predictive methods of the past, the world now recognizes that an iterative, cyclical process is significantly faster and cheaper, even if you can't promise everything up front. The origins of this revolution trace back to the creation of the Agile … [Read more...]
OceanGate was Agile
By now most people have heard about the disaster of the OceanGate Titan, the underwater submersible that imploded on its way down to the Titanic wreck site carrying five billionaires on a tourist mission. I'm genuinely surprised about how little the project management community is talking about this, because the lessons appear to be vast. Although the cause is not … [Read more...]
How to Use Kanban to Improve Projects
Kanban is a task scheduling method originally developed by the Toyota Production System in the 1960's to track inventory levels. Although it is being still used in some manufacturing plants, today kanban has obtained greater use in the software industry to manage work in progress. It is one of those simple, yet amazingly effective tools that most people who … [Read more...]