LeanKit and Focused Objective announced a partnership to provide customers with an integrated product offering. The combined solution will bring industry leading quantitative analysis to LeanKit’s and Focused Objective’s customer base in an easy to use and immediately available way. This analysis includes forecasting project delivery dates, pinpointing what factors such as staffing, quality, scope change, etc. are having the greatest impact on delivery dates, and the ability to find what staff skill additions will have the most impact.

Altova announced the public beta launch of MetaTeam, a new team management and project collaboration cloud service. MetaTeam is a different kind of project management solution. It breaks down the mysteries of team organization into simple steps that anyone — not just project managers — can use effectively.

Zilicus announced launch of its online project management software ZilicusPM on Google Apps Marketplace. With the launch of ZilicusPM on Google Apps Marketplace, over 4 million business users who are currently using Google Apps Marketplace will be able to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. ZilicusPM integrates the user account with application data stored in Google Apps, thus provides a simplified user experience, increased business efficiency, and reduced administrative overhead.

Systems and software projects traditionally experienced some degree of project failure. In this context, failure is defined as a project that demonstrated a failure to match, within a reasonable tolerance, the expected outcome. Successful software projects demonstrate good project management methods incorporating modern processes and effective utilization of
metrics. This article extends the application of control theory methods to project management decisions to include optimization of systems trade-offs to improve project performance.

Historically, estimation methods have focused on effort at the team level. Recent agile software development practices have shed light on taking individuals – who are acting as part of a team—into consideration. A lot of software – mobile device apps, services, components – is now written by one-person teams, thus demonstrating the need for engineering discipline at the individual level. Emerging trends in software development for mobile devices suggest effort estimation methods can be employed for one-person endeavors and those methods can benefit teams, but those methods are still very …

Marathon training and product development have a lot of similarities. They should be both treated and executed as time bound and goal oriented projects. To be successful, you need a lot of flexibility, introspection and continuous improvisation.

We’re agile, so we don’t have to estimate and have no deadlines, right? Wrong! This session provides a review of the problem with estimation in projects today, and then an overview of the concept of agile estimation and the notion of re-estimation.

Daptiv has announced general availability of a Japanese language version of Daptiv PPM. The new offering was a direct result of feedback from customers in the Asia Pacific region. Demand for SaaS software is at an all-time high in Japan, with revenues expected to reach $629.1 million by the end of 2015 (Source: Gartner “Forecast: Software as a Service, All Regions”, 2010-2015, press release Sept 14, 2011). This represents a doubling in growth from 2010 when SaaS revenues reached $315.3 million in Japan.

While Kanban has a reputation for being the solution for the Service Delivery side of the IT world, it is highly applicable to classic Product/System Development as well. Thru stories, boards and visibility charts from real clients we will see what works, what’s irrelevant, what’s missing, and how to fill the gaps.

iRise and AppFusions announced new integrations between iRise and two leading products from Atlassian, one of the world’s most popular providers of collaborative platforms for software developers. iRise visualization gives users the ability to create visual prototypes of new software projects that look and act just like the real thing, before a single line of code is written.