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Project Management

Tutorials

MD Dealing with Estimation, Uncertainty, Risk, and Commitment
Todd Little, Landmark Graphics Corporation
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

Software projects are known to have challenges with estimation, uncertainty, risk, and commitment—and the most valuable projects often carry the most risk. Other industries also encounter risk and generate value by understanding and managing that risk effectively. Todd Little explores techniques used in a number of risky businesses—product development, oil and gas exploration, investment banking, medicine, weather forecasting, and gambling—and shares what those industries have done to manage uncertainty.

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TA Deliver Projects On Time, Every Time
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Ken Whitaker shares pragmatic techniques to help project managers and software development leaders put into practice innovative scheduling techniques, make consistent customer-centric decisions, reduce project risk, quickly negotiate with product owners the most important project scope, and transition teams to become more agile. Ken shares revealing statistical data on how waterfall is simply not suited for modern-day adaptive software development projects. With fellow participants, you’ll spend time performing a “Scrum walkabout” to get the idea of just how an agile project really works.

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TJ Software Metrics: Taking the Guesswork Out of Software Projects
Ed Weller, Integrated Productivity Solutions, LLC
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Why bother with measurement and metrics? If you never use the data you collect, this is a valid question—and the answer is “Don’t bother, it’s a waste of time.” In that case, you’ll manage with opinions, personalities, and guesses—or even worse, misconceptions and misunderstandings. Based on his more than forty years of software and systems development experience, Ed Weller describes reasons for measurement, key measures in both traditional and agile environments, decisions enabled by measurement, and lessons learned from successful—and not so successful—measurement programs.

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TP Influence Strategies for Software Professionals
Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way.

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Concurrent Sessions

AW2 Governing Agile Teams: Disciplined Strategies to Increase Agile Effectiveness
Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Many organizations have successfully adopted agile on a subset of their projects, while, at the same time, struggled to do so across entire departments. A common challenge is the need to overhaul the IT governance strategy so that it will work with agile teams. This is a serious issue for governance bodies with little or no practical agile experience, particularly when experience shows that traditional governance strategies increase the risk of failure on agile projects. Scott Ambler introduces The Disciplined Agile Delivery framework for managing and monitoring enterprise agile teams.

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BW1 Seven Deadly Habits of Dysfunctional Software Managers
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—and ways to avoid them.

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BW2 Building Customer Feedback Loops: Learn Quicker, Design Smarter
Sherif Mansour, Atlassian
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Listening to your customers is critical to developing better software. Their feedback enables you to stay in sync with customer expectations, to make changes before those changes become costly, and to pivot if necessary. Sharif shares five practical tips for building, capturing, and scaling feedback loops, providing real examples of what his team has learned.

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BT7 Quality Debt: Is Your Project Going Bankrupt?
Jordan Setters, Planit Software Testing, Ltd.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

Every decision made during the course of a project can affect the quality of the final product.  Compromises in functionality, design, or implementation invariably come with a cost, which must be paid. Without an adequate measure of the debt a product is carrying, no strategy to repay it can be formulated, and the project may ultimately become bankrupt, affecting your business case, your users’ productivity, and your organization’s bottom line. Taking from the concept of technical debt, Jordan Setters gives it a quality twist.

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AT5 The 21st Century Needs Radical Management
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

Most management methods in use today have been around for more than fifty years. During that time, the work has changed dramatically and so have the types of workers. The new ways of working that have emerged do not align well with the old ways of managing. In the 21st century, management must change to accommodate these new realities. Radical management involves changing the focus from stakeholders to customers, from controlling to enabling, from coordination to linking, from efficiency to improvement, and from telling to communicating.

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AW1 Leading the Creation of an Agile Culture
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Even today, to the detriment of agile success, most organizational cultures remain delivery date-driven—resulting in delivery teams that are not focused on creating value for the customer. So how can we redirect stakeholders, the business, and the project team to concentrate on delivering the greatest value rather than simply meeting dates? Pollyanna Pixton describes the tools she has used in collaboration sessions to help participants begin the process of adopting customer-centric agile methods.

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BT12 Exploding Management Myths
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

We’ve all heard management “nuggets” such as “make people come to you with solutions, nut just problems,” or “training time is wasted time,” or my favorite, “work smarter.” But how are you supposed to do that, especially if you may not have received any management training, or if your gut is telling you what you’re doing might not be working? Johanna Rothman explains that much of what you have heard about management is myth—based not on evidence, but on ideas dating from the Industrial Revolution. However, many myths have a germ of truth.

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