Author: Project Management Planet

The Agile Team and the Project Office

In this article, Carlos Eduardo dos Santos Nunes shares some of his experience of situation where an Agile team has to cooperate with a Project Office (PMO). In some situations, you have to take into account the importance of project management, based on the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge)...

Scrumban: Combining Scrum and Kanban

Corey Ladas wrote a classic essay on Scrum-ban where he discusses Scrum and Kanban hybrids. He presents the concept of index card and explains that Kanban is more than just a work request on a card and putting sticky notes on a whiteboard is not enough to implement a pull...

Competency Model For Project Managers

In this interesting blog post, Glen Alleman discusses the concept of competency models for project managers. He lists a set of elements that should be used to assess project managers in the following areas of competence: performance measurement, status reporting, organizational processes, team building, staff development, perspective, negotiation, risk management,...

State of Kanban & Lean in the Software Development World

It has been 5 years since David Anderson and Rick Garber first presented the Kanban Method to a limited audience at small conference in Chicago. This session gives the Lean and Kanban community in the software development domain an opportunity for reflection on how far we’ve come in 5 years...

Responsibility Matrix in Scrum Projects

In this article, Christophe Le Coent discusses shared responsibilities and clear accountability in software development projects. He proposes a RACI+F matrix where the letters have the following meaning: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, Facilitate. This allows to create RACI+F matrix for the Scrum project activities for each Scrum roles. This matrix...

Smarter Management Decisions with Velocity

In this blog post, Steve Andrews discusses the usage of team velocity to plan the next Scrum sprints and how can we use it to make more informed management decisions. Using a quantitative management approach and Agile methods allows us to actually measure the impact of management decisions on the...

10 Deadly Sins of Software Estimation

Steve McConnell presents 10 of the worst ways estimates go wrong and provides time-tested rules of thumb for dramatically improving estimation accuracy. The average project overruns its planned budget and schedule by 50%-80%. In practice, little work is done that could truly be called “estimation.” Many projects are scheduled using...

Wrong Start for Scrum

In this blog post, Johanna Rothman shows some of the common problem of teams that think they start using Scrum but stick to traditional project management planning. Some of the smells of this situation could be the fact that the ScrumMaster keep preparing Gantt charts for the iteration or that...