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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…
Congrats! You have identified a high-performing, top-notch software development team to design and build your product. (If you are still looking for a team read this.) Want to know how to get the most out of the team? Below are 5 techniques to turn up the high-performance dial.
Most Agile teams plan work for an iteration by assigning points to user stories and selecting as many stories off the top of the priority queue as will fit within that team’s projected velocity for the iteration. In larger projects, the stories are often written and prioritized by a project manager or some other person…
It’s simple to define what “done” means on an agile project. It means it’s done — ready to use, complete. It’s not quite as simple to define “in progress.” Saying a task is “in progress” might mean a task is: Completed and awaiting verification. Currently under active development. In the queue to be worked on….
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…
If your team is not focused on delivering intermediate project milestones, they are missing what’s really of value. It’s easy to miss the forest for the trees if you’re only focusing on task-level points estimates and velocity tracking. I’ve become frustrated with how burn charts focus on showing progress through an entire backlog and don’t…
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…
This is the snack counter in our office. It’s centrally located, which means the phrase “co-located, poly-skilled, self-managing teams of makers” is visible from pretty much anywhere in our office. I’ve written before about how our poly-skilled teams function. In that post, I touched on how our teams manage their own projects instead of reporting…
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…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object