According to Wikipedia: Project Management project scope is:
The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish.
We can talk about what is “in-scope”, i.e. what the project is meant to delivery, and what is “out-of-scope”, i.e. what won’t be delivered.
Typically the project scope is a subset of the scope of the product under development.
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Traditional project managers are often uncomfortable with the apparently unstructured nature of agile software development. This article gives a definition of project management, and then goes on to cover traditional project management, why software development is different, how agile project management is different, and the role of an agile project manager.
According to Wikipedia: Project Management
Project Management is the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.
Unlike operational activities, which are on-going, a project is finite with a beginning and end. Each project is trying to achieve a clear objective and bring about change. Not surprisingly in the software development world that typically means building software. Project management has to balance scope, quality, time and budget to achieve the given objective.
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I did a big Agile roll out and the team came up with a list of the things which might upset the Agile process – Agile gotchas. When I have sometime I will add suggestions for how to deal with them.
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One company I worked with called the start of the project the “Blueprint” as it is about roughly shaping the project and product. “Inception” is another common term for this phase in agile projects. This article outlines traditional project initiation then delves into more detail on Agile Project Initiation.
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All software development methods, including the Agile ones, have some sort of underlying project lifecycle. System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is the common name for a software development process, but in the Agile world I prefer calling it a “heartbeat” reflecting the organic nature of an Agile project. Some of the big Agile methods don’t make a big deal of the heartbeat and others do. Some have such abstract lifecycles that it is actually hard to know what activities to schedule. And they all use different terms for the same thing. I have pulled out the common activities to create a generic agile lifecycle.
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Although “everyone is doing it” is a reason to consider Agile it isn’t necessarily a reason to go Agile. I’ve thought it useful to outline reasons for going Agile and where possible provides research data to back up the argument. The data can be used to form the basis of a Business Case for Agile.
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All the major Agile methods have different terminology. I try to use traditional terms rather than the term used in any of the Agile methods. I’ve put together a table that gives a rough comparison of the different terms.
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Risk management is about identifying, addressing, and eliminating sources of risk before they become a threat to the project. This article outlines traditional risk management, how Agile is a risk mitigation strategy, and how to do Agile risk management.
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For the last two years I have been rolling out a standard Agile approach to a department of 350. One part of the roll out strategy was to have a published standard. This was to make the goal / end-game obvious even if we didn’t initially mandate everything.
The first version of the standard, published Oct 2006, was a 50 page document. Earlier drafts had been quite short but in reviewing the document people kept asking “What does that mean?” so we’d add another section explaining it. All rather worthy but, aside from the initial reviews before publication, nobody read it. And it diluted the document as a standard, defining what must be done, as opposed to a guideline about how to do it.
We published version 2 today. This version of the standard is one page. I want to give people a simple checklist so they know whether or not they are following the standard.
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In their book “Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case against XP” Stephens and Rosenberg (2003) outline their reasons for not liking XP as it is published, but they also outline what they do like and how risk can be reduced when using an XP like process. I found their book rather long (and the humour rather unentertaining) but they made some good points and I made a few notes about their conclusions.
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