Four DOs and DON’Ts for Software Systems Integrations
Systems integrations can be wonderful when they work, but they often end in failure. Here are four tips to improve your success rate.
Project Management
You Can’t Always Outwork the Requests! (How to Reduce an Overloaded Queue)
We’ve all been there—that moment when you realize you’ve bitten off a little more work than you can handle. Interestingly, the more you increase your skill level, the more often you find yourself in this situation. It stands to reason; people like to assign work to competent and talented people.
Best Practices for Scheduling Creative Teams
Managing project team schedules is one of the most challenging parts of running a consultancy. Optimizing for client release dates, assigning the right team to the job, creating good mentoring opportunities, connecting individual team members with a project that they’re personally passionate about, and minimizing schedule gaps to protect your own cash flow is an […]
Don’t Suffer in Silence – A Template for Scary Conversations
People are complex and not always direct in their communication. This dynamic has the potential to create misunderstandings that can lead to a lot of anxiety when developing software. I’ve felt that anxiety myself from time to time, and it can be poisonous, leading to a lack of sleep, a lack of trust, and ultimately […]
Agile + Scrum = More Effective Iteration Meetings
Do your iteration meetings drag on forever, include thrashing and tangential conversations, or seem generally unproductive? Being structured about agile iteration meetings allows the Development Team to stay on track and get the most value from stakeholders’ time.
Growing Developers and Designers into Leaders
Technical and design skills are critical to the work we do building software. But it takes much more than technical and design excellence to bring a complex project to fruition and run a successful consultancy.
Project Leads vs. Project Managers
Atomic Object has no dedicated, specialized project managers. Instead, we have project leads who play multiple roles of implementor, team lead, and project manager. Benefits of the Project Lead Model As a designer or developer, the project lead is intimately familiar with the product’s user needs and related features. They know the team’s implementation plan […]
7 Ways to Keep Your Big Project Agile
Most of our projects here at Atomic Object take just 2-6 developers. But sometimes we work closely with other teams that are much larger. On my current project, we’re part of our client’s much larger team, about 20 people. The team started out small, and as we’ve grown in size, we’ve had to refactor our […]
Prioritizing Refinements – Choose Wisely
As software craftspeople, we constantly reach for sublime elegance in our work. Just beyond every module rewrite or subsystem refactoring is the paradise of ultimate modularity, configurability, and simplicity — somewhere we never quite arrive. However, we shouldn’t fall prey to actually believing that given the necessary time to implement every abstraction, refactoring, and re-organization […]
The Three Layers of Management
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 […]