Tag Archives: Project management

Change requests: In or Out

Many junior PMs think that Change Requests (in our company we call them Change Orders) always come to project team from the outer space, whenever the client or other stakeholders want to change something, like increase the scope or tighten the schedule. They think that CRs are there to protect the project team from changes [...]
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What are your priorities?

Sounds familiar? (via Geek and Poke)
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Can you commit to release date 323 days from now?

Toy Story 3. Release date: June 18, 2010. 323 days from now. Does not that amaze you? No? Most likely you are not a Project Manager. And certainly not a software Project Manager. In software world we know how hard estimation is. And to date I have not met a Project Manager, who would commit to a [...]
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Weekend reading: Software projects planning and estimation

Here are some links to interesting stuff on software estimation and projects planning for weekend reading and watching. Your Will Suffer From Power Laws. There are some things, which are the way the are, and you can not change them, even if you want. You can not spit upwind (at least, not with desirable result); you [...]
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Wimbledon – perfect uncertainty management

For years I’ve been using Wimbledon tournament as an example of really good uncertainty management: with all those games taking very different amounts of time, unpredictable rains (in 2008 man’s final was interrupted twice) – it is a scheduling nightmare. Yet, man’s final always happens on the 2nd Sunday of tournament (except for 2001 when [...]
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Predictability over… everything

Many years ago when I was at school I was serious about orienting. Once I even was 3rd in national championship. And the trainer always told us “Stability is a sign of mastery”. No matter how fast you are on the training you’ve got to be able to repeat this result in real competitions [...]
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Why "agile" is better

Software developers like being “agile”, whatever this means. They say being “agile” liberates their creativity and lets positive energies of the Universe flow through them to the code to (hopefully) solve customer’s problems. They are committed to using all the practices that e.g. XP suggests, but it generally would be better if somebody else [...]
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Big questions – small answers

Today I found some new answers to questions I was asking and was asked. Here they are: Q: How do you define a “small” and “large” project? A: Small project is project with homogeneous development environments. In large project the environment is heterogeneous. For instance, C# + SQL is homogeneous environment, while Java + Flash, or [...]
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The Project Management Podcast

I’ve already mentioned several times that I absolutely love Advanced Selling Podcast since the first episode I’ve listened to. One day I said to myself: “If there is selling podcast, there should be project management podcast”. I went to Google and found the Project Management  Podcast. I’ve downloaded a whole bunch of episodes some dating [...]
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