Articles

Wrecking a Project

If you want to commit industrial espionage at the company you work for, there are few roles as capable of harm as a project sponsor. For executives seeking to undermine a project and assure failure, we identify tactics that quickly crash projects and suck the life from project staff.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
Par for the Course

What can happen over a game of golf? You learn what you don't know, you learn more about what you do know, and you learn to listen to what others know. See how two managers and a caddy team up for some valuable lessons about staying out of the rough.

Patrick Bailey's picture Patrick Bailey
serial project cumulative flow Seeing Work in Progress

When the data is before you, it's clear to see how agile can improve productivity and time to market. If you're considering a transition to agile but don't know how to make the case to upper management, Johanna Rothman provides you with the data you'll need.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Outside the Strike Zone

In a counterpoint to his previous Technically Speaking column, Lee explains why holding fast to one's beliefs is not necessarily a bad thing.

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland
Countdown to Agility

Jean Tabaka believes in the power of an entire agile organization. These ten characteristics of an agile organization may seem counter to market success, but she explores why they are wholly embedded in twenty-first century business success.

Jean Tabaka's picture Jean Tabaka
Project Time Reporting

Project time reporting evokes a passionate response from most team members-- the consensus is they hate it. While Payson Hall worries about supporting something so unpopular, he offers benefits of project time reporting and explores some of the common implementation issues that undermine its value.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
It Takes a Village

Pair programming is an Agile practice that has been shown to greatly improve code quality without a huge increase in development time. This article explains the ins and outs of pair programming and some things you need to consider before you tell team members to grab a partner and get programming.

Ronica Roth's picture Ronica Roth
Rescuing a Captive Project

Allowing an individual to hold a project hostage to his knowledge and expertise is bad for the project and for the team. Fiona Charles describes one captive project and shows how it could have been remedied.

Fiona Charles's picture Fiona Charles
project portfolio chart No: Such a Difficult Word

When people begin to get overworked, it's common to fall back on blaming the old chestnut "time management." But the problem may have less to do with how you allocate time to projects than your inability to say no to some of those projects in the first place. In this article, Johanna Rothman takes a look at the difficulty of saying no and offers some suggestions for overcoming it.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman
Predicting the Past

Developing an accurate prediction process is complex, time consuming, and difficult. But, basing predictions on causality rather than correlation and learning how to "predict the past" can help us gain confidence in the validity of our work.

Lee Copeland's picture Lee Copeland

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