Kent J. McDonald
Member for
13 years 7 monthsKent J. McDonald is an author, speaker, and coach who helps organizations improve the effectiveness of their projects. His more than fifteen years of experience includes work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility and currently delivers business analysis training for B2T Training, and shares his thoughts on project effectiveness at BeyondRequirements.com.
All Articles by Kent J. McDonald
All Stories by Kent J. McDonald
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Using Goals, Objectives, and Assumptions to Model Value (or Not) Kent McDonald writes that identifying objectives and the assumptions underlying them provides you a way to measure whether the result of your project will actually get you closer to what you are trying to accomplish, as well as the impact your various assumptions have on reaching that objective. |
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Comprehensive Documentation Has Its Place Kent McDonald shares some tips on documentation approaches that he and his team used on a recent project. The key is to find the bare minimum of documentation that you need from both a project documentation and system documentation perspective and only add additional documentation when it hurts not to add it. |
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Using Real Options to Decide When to Decide Kent McDonald writes on using the idea of real options in your everyday life, including your software projects. When you are faced with a decision, find out what your options are, find out when they no longer become options, and use the intervening time to uncover more information so that you can make an informed decision. |
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How Visualization Boards Can Benefit Your Team While many teams can use help structuring their conversations, some teams also need some way to know whether the structured conversations that have taken place have provided sufficient information. Kent McDonald explains how using visualization boards can help in these situations. |
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What Decorating Cakes Can Teach Us about Iterations Kent McDonald shares with us a story about decorating cakes and how that relates to doing agile the right way. To be truly effective, teams need to focus more on the need to reflect and adapt, and then figure out the best way to do that in their environment without worrying about whether they are doing it exactly right. |
| Building a Backlog for Legacy System ChangesKent McDonald writes that teams often assume that they cannot split their changes into small stories because the resulting stories would not provide value. What they fail to realize is that they can split these bigger changes into smaller changes and gain value by showing their stakeholders, getting feedback, and incorporating that feedback in their continued development. | |
| Can You Manage Business Analysts without Measuring Them? Kent McDonald writes on how to manage business analysts without measuring them. You can do so if you view management as helping business analysts improve their skill sets while helping them be productive members of their team. If, however, you view business analysts as “resources,” you will more than likely find individual measurements quite useful. |
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| Deliver Value; Don’t Measure Efficiency Kent McDonald explains why concentrating too much on efficiency metrics can take you away from delivering value. A focus on value—truly seeking to solve your stakeholder's problems—will lead to the best outcome for the stakeholders. |
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| Douglas Adams on Software DevelopmentIn honor of what would have been Douglas Adams' sixty-first birthday, Kent McDonald explains how the esteemed author is still relevant to today's software professional. While Adams was alive he shared numerous, unintentional pearls of wisdom about software development and knowledge work that are as relevant and chuckle inducing today as they were when he wrote them. | |
| A Product Owner’s First Glimpse of AgileKent McDonald introduces us to Arthur, a middle manager and product owner in a medium-sized insurance company who has been assigned to take on an agile project. For those unfamiliar with agile, the terminology and techniques of agile approaches can seem strange and often a little silly when not accompanied with an explanation as to why those techniques exist. Kent explains the challenges product owners like Arthur face and how to make product owners understand agile better. |