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In a previous post, Tear Down the Walls! — Shattering Team Boundaries, I discussed the boundaries (or silos) that traditional teams often end up segregating into, especially when deadlines are looming. The project I am on has many teams scattered across multiple physical locations (even continents), and teams are frequently under separate silos of management. Epic-level…
We’ve always made project management an important and inseparable part of our development and design services. When Atomic Object was younger, we would tend to focus on the technical aspects of project management — story estimation and prioritization, velocity, burn charts, etc. This made us very good at the predictive or quantitative aspects of project…
Before continuing to write about the specifics of managing software projects, I want to double back around to explain the most valuable things that must be done in any company attempting to run multiple projects at the same time. Below are a few examples of such companies and the difficulties that may be experienced. A…
In my last post, I described how I was re-schooled in the basics of project management with the discovery of critical chain methods. We got amazing results by applying critical chain to our traditional software development projects: We challenged ourselves to find ways of delivering faster. This drove us to think backwards from the deliverable…
For 10 years, I thought I was a very good project manager. By very good, I mean that almost all of the projects I led were delivered near scope and on schedule. There were no death marches of overtime, and we pushed the technology envelope. Overall, we enjoyed the work. It was not without its…
Atomic Object has helped many companies design and implement new software products. I’ve noticed different environments at companies that are primed for innovation and companies that are not. Operational Mindset Roger Martin’s knowledge funnel concept describes how business practices become more algorithmic as organizations scale and strive for efficiency. As companies scale, their technology departments…
Your team won’t have a traditional task backlog if you stage it out through scheduled iterations. Staging your team’s task backlog into scheduled iterations is an important part of managing your project to intermediate milestones. Atomic’s teams commonly decompose a project into a backlog of tasks that can accomplished in a day or less. Backlogs…
Like everyone else, I have a lot of stuff — a lot of stuff to do. In my never-ending quest to make sense of it all, I’ve tried more planners, bins, and drawer organizers (not to mention apps and online to-do lists) than I care to think about. And almost none of it helped. In…
When someone is developing a new product, they often focus on two questions: Will people buy it? Can we produce it cheaply enough to turn a profit? While these are both essential, there’s a lot more to Product Development. In fact, reducing Product Development to “What will make us money next year?” is dangerous to…
Dedicated, poly-skilled project teams are more effective at delivering innovation projects than well-honed, departmentally-distributed, operationally-focused teams. The choice of using an internal vs. external team is often considered when planning how to take on a significant innovation project. Internal expertise and capacity are two common factors used to assess the viability of the internal team….
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object