Employing too many ideas people leads to Zombie Projects. Resuscitate the Zombies or kill them off.
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Tag Archives: programme management
“Mad, Relentless, Scary, Fun” – my year on Digital Growth
“Mad, Relentless, Scary, Fun” is how my programme director – Stuart Mays – described the initiative we’ve been running at at Global Media and Entertainment.
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Programmes are above Projects on the Value Ladder
The Value Ladder highlights how a supplier contributes to the success of the customer. The way I see it programmes and projects can be mapped onto the Value Ladder.
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Continuous Delivery by Default; Timeboxes by Exception
Once I used timeboxes by default. Now I relegate Sprints and such like to exception situations.
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Programmes can use more than one method: Kanban, Scrum, XP, BDD, etc
I have my preferences – Kanban and BDD – but don’t enforce these on my teams. That means I’ve got a couple of Scrum (ish) teams and teams that don’t use BDD. And I also have a bunch of people working in isolation – I just leave them to it.
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35 person-years worth of prototype is a fantastic spec
I once invested 35 person-years worth of effort on prototyping. From my perspective this was time and money well invested. By the end of that time we knew, really knew, what problems our customers were facing and how to solve them.
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Deming wasn’t a fan of Management by Walking Around
W. Edwards Deming, credited with launching the Total Quality Management movement, wasn’t a fan of Management by Walking Around.
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How to get Agile experience as a project manager? Just start
Tim felt in a Catch-22 situation. He wanted to break into Agile, however, without experience he had little chance of landing a job running an Agile project. He felt stuck and wanted help to find a way forward. My advice – just start.
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Little’s Law – the basis of Lean and Kanban
Sometimes I think it helps to go back to basics. And when using Lean Software Development, including Kanban, that means a man called Little and his Law. “Little’s Law” is a fundamental of queue theory and defines the relationship between Work in Progress (WIP), Throughput and Lead Time. It is the reason why Kanban teams try to limit WIP.
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I hate part time assignments to projects; they challenge WIP limits
I hate part time assignments – when I see people being asked to split their time across projects. Where ever possible I try to get people full time on one thing at a time.
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