Topic: project management
Soft skills become imperative to be an effective project manager
While every developer is different, there is one thing that almost all of them have in common: the desire to build. Developers do not want to be bogged down by dependencies or constantly having to pause and answer questions from a helicopter manager; they just want to create. This is why the job of the … continue reading
The Fungible Fallacy: Sociological impediments to effective project management
Part 1 of this article focused on the structural issues of how staff fungibility (the concept that one staff member can be substituted for another) can impede project management. The project management notions of project-month and full-time equivalent, are used to apply simple mathematical operators to people (e.g., two half-time people equals one full time … continue reading
In project management, size does matter
There is a potential train wreck out there. According to the trade press and peer-reviewed journals alike, systems development is in trouble. The much revered, and equally reviled, Standish Group’s Chaos Report says that only about 30% of systems development projects succeed, 20% outright fail or are cancelled, and around 50% hobble along in some … continue reading
Confusing the What with the How
Imagine you are building a house. You get all your tools, lay out the lumber, and start constructing the first room. As you are building the room, you decide if it’s a living room, or a kitchen, or a bathroom. When you finish the first room you start on the second, again deciding, as you … continue reading
Maximizing the ROI of your Agile transformations
Agile is hard. After over 20 years, organizations are still failing to realize the full benefits of Agile transformations at scale. They’ve seen the impact of Agile at the team level, being able to improve productivity, decrease risks and costs, and increase revenue, but they are failing to maximize those benefits across the enterprise. “As … continue reading
LinearB, Clubhouse partner to provide software delivery intelligence
Project management solution startups LinearB and Clubhouse are partnering to provide software development teams insights into their efforts so they can continue to improve project delivery, the companies announced today. The technical integration of the company’s offerings “will offer dev teams detailed project visibility and team-based metrics by correlating data across projects, code, Git activity … continue reading
SD Times news digest: Project management provider Clubhouse raises $25 million, C3 AI Ex Machina, and GitLab’s new subscription model
The project management software provider Clubhouse has revealed a $25 million round of funding to help expand its efforts and advance its solutions, Forbes reports. The company’s collaborative project management software aims to streamline and refine existing workflows. Features include Story for tasks, chores, features and bugs; Epics and Milestones so team members can have … continue reading
Startup takes data-driven approach to software delivery
Project management has historically had a top-down mindset that provides metrics to executives as to how their individual developers are performing. And those metrics, claimed Dan Lines, COO at project management solution startup LinearB, aren’t giving value to developers. “Software project management is broken,” Lines told SD Times in a recent interview. “Developers don’t want … continue reading
5 tasks project managers must perform to ‘sell’ their proposals
Did you ever stay up late watching infomercials on TV? Remember the salesman selling that stainless-steel turnip slicer-yogurt steamer, “And if you act now….” He must have been talking more than 200 words a minute. Three A.M., a crummy set behind him, a questionable item that might fall apart faster than its overnight delivery, and … continue reading
premium Don’t throw away that throwaway code
Want to quickly know how good a project manager is? Here is an old consultant’s trick: Ask a programmer on the team how much throwaway code he or she used during the last project. A good 80/20 rule is the more throwaway code used during development, the better the project manager. Throwaway code refers to … continue reading
LaunchNotes now available to help dev teams keep track of product changes
After three months in private beta, LaunchNotes is now generally available. LaunchNotes is a new platform designed to keep development teams on top of product changes, communicate with users about changes coming, and provide updates to stakeholders. According to the company, Agile and DevOps practices are making it hard to communicate the right information to … continue reading
premium Squandering the honeymoon period
The 18-month project was approved, funded, and project team members, users and user management attended the project kickoff meeting for the new system. Six months later the project is on schedule and on budget. Yet, unknown to the team, problems are brewing that cannot only sink the on-time and on-budget project, but these problems might … continue reading
