Kiron Bondale

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

After taking a break from writing for a few weeks, I was planning to write about the importance of conversation in the work we do, but a late day Mastodon toot caught my attention today: “ Gantt charts are lies “ Based on the hashtags accompanying the post, the author works in the software development domain using adaptive approaches. While I can empathize with the frustration underlying the post, it resonated with me in the same manner as if someone had written “ Flat head scr

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Software Developers Software Development Monitoring Leadership 177

Kiron Bondale

FEBRUARY 6, 2023

When I first read it, I found that one of the more interesting characters in Tom Clancy’s debut novel, The Hunt for Red October , was the political officer, Ivan Putin. His role is to ensure that the leadership and crew of the nuclear submarine were acting in alignment with the values and principles of the Soviet Union. He acts independent from the rest of the crew as his reporting relationship is to Moscow and not to the submarine’s leadership team.

Construction 194

Construction Leadership Risk Management Controlling 194

Kiron Bondale

JANUARY 26, 2023

(Before you correct me for misstating the iconic quote in this article’s title, read ahead) Over the past week, I’ve seen a number of posts from different practitioners on the Mastodon.world instance complaining about agile. Here are a few of the examples I’ve read: Agile events or meetings taking up most of the productive time each day User stories not providing an understanding of a user’s needs and wants Continuous delivery of changes resulting in significant unplanned

Agile 177

Agile Leadership 177

Kiron Bondale

JANUARY 22, 2023

A Mastodon post inspired me to ask ChatGPT to compose a song about agility in a Weird Al Yankovic take on Right Said Fred’s “I’m too sexy” Hope you like it! Verse 1: I’m an agile developer, hear me code I’m always delivering, never on the road I’m working in sprints, and I’m doing just fine I’m always on time, and my code is divine Chorus: I’m too Agile, for your waterfall ways I’m too Agile, for your slow and delayed days I’

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Agile ChatGPT Leadership SCRUM 136

Kiron Bondale

JANUARY 16, 2023

I’m in the middle of Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton’s book Leading with Gratitude. I really enjoyed one of their previous books, The Carrot Principle , which provided great case studies on the importance of recognition in the work place as well as multiple suggestions on ways to recognize colleagues without spending a cent. Leading with Gratitude is a very readable sequel to the previous one, and focuses on the importance of gratitude in improving individual, team and company perfo

Leadership 177

Leadership SCRUM 177

Kiron Bondale

JANUARY 9, 2023

This week, I participated in an interesting discussion on Mastodon in which the initiator asked for input on ways to frame agility based on the core problems which a team might be trying to solve. This is useful as it can help to answer the “why” behind an approach change. However, when I indicated that there were problems which a shift to an adaptive approach wouldn’t solve, the initiator wanted clarification about my feedback.

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Agile Finance Controlling Initiating 177

Kiron Bondale

JANUARY 3, 2023

As I’ve done in past years, I like to review the articles I’ve written over the year and share the ones which were read the most. 2022 was the first year since I started blogging when I took a hiatus of more than a couple of weeks. While I was able to write a few articles in the late Summer based on my municipal election campaign, the overall number of articles this year was less than in previous years.

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2022 Leadership 2023 Consulting 177

Kiron Bondale

DECEMBER 27, 2022

The holiday season usually involves family get togethers, and one of our traditions for such events is to play one or two new board games. While playing the games is a lot of fun it is also a source of some useful lessons in project management. Have the right number of players. Most board games will provide details on the minimum number of players required and some will also indicate the maximum.

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Leadership Process Planning 136

Kiron Bondale

DECEMBER 19, 2022

Whether you have taken a foundational project management course which covered practices for predictive approaches or you were studying to take the PMP exam, you are likely familiar with schedule network diagrams. However, like many tools and practices in the PMBOK framework, just because we learn about them doesn’t mean we will use them. If you skip creating network diagrams, you could miss out on these benefits.

Leadership 194

Leadership 194

Kiron Bondale

DECEMBER 12, 2022

For those of you who are Do It Yourself (DIY) pros, you may not consider this a significant accomplishment, but not usually being a DIY’er, I am quite pleased with having installed ceramic wall tiles for the first time ever. In this particular case, the tiling was backsplash for our main bathroom sink area. Once the work was completed, a friend who had provided a lot of hands-on assistance and tool support suggested that there might be some delivery lessons I could harvest from this home i

Risk 244

Risk Leadership Planning Risk Management 244

Kiron Bondale

DECEMBER 5, 2022

Regardless of what type of work your team does, work boards can be a helpful tool. But just because they can be helpful doesn’t mean they are always implemented well. The most common mistake is when teams don’t keep their work boards up to date with the actual status of work that is being done. Increasing transparency is a great way for stakeholders to understand what is going on and to increase their level of trust in teams.

SCRUM 177

SCRUM Leadership Agile 177

Kiron Bondale

NOVEMBER 20, 2022

The term “technical debt” is familiar to many in the delivery world, especially those working on technology initiatives. Ward Cunningham had originally used the well known concept of financial debt as a metaphor for the consequences of decisions made with imperfect or partial information. The term has been mistakenly used by some to refer to poor product quality resulting from teams cutting corners but that was not its original intent.

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Underperforming Technical Team Leadership Initiating 177

Kiron Bondale

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

I am midway through Annie Duke’s latest book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. If you are not already familiar with Annie’s background, she was a very successful professional poker player who applied the lessons she learned from playing poker to writing and consulting on improving how we make decisions. Her latest book tackles the challenges we face with knowing when it is the right time to quit.

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Consulting Risk Leadership Risk Management 194

Kiron Bondale

NOVEMBER 2, 2022

My previous article covered the risks which were realized through my campaign to become a councilor within Welland’s city council in the recent municipal elections. This one focuses on the lessons I learned through the project’s lifetime. With the exception of two streets where I had a couple of kind volunteers drop off my campaign flyers, I did all the door-to-door canvassing myself.

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2026 Governance Government Leadership 317

Kiron Bondale

OCTOBER 26, 2022

Those of you who read my articles regularly will know that I took a hiatus from writing about leadership and delivery topics over the past couple of months to focus on my first time campaign running for one of the city councilor seats in Welland. Election day was this past Monday (October 24) and unfortunately, while I received a fair number of votes, it was not enough to unseat one of the two incumbents in my ward.

Risk 316

Risk Transportation Risk Management Leadership 316

Kiron Bondale

OCTOBER 12, 2022

As I mentioned a couple of articles back, I’m taking a brief hiatus from writing my usual delivery-focused content in this blog so that I can focus on my campaign to be elected as a city councilor in Welland’s ward 4. However, if you are experiencing withdrawal symptoms and wanted to see what I’ve been up to, you might care to read the articles I’ve written over the past few weeks related to my campaign.

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Kiron Bondale

SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

After “ What certification should I get after the PMP? “, the next most common certification-related question I see on LinkedIn and ProjectManagement.com discussion groups is asking how to get ready to write the PMP exam and how much elapsed time should be allowed for this effort. This question reminds me very much of the fun exercise which I ask learners in my foundational project management course to complete: “ How long does it take to catch a fish?

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Certification PMI Closing Leadership 333

Kiron Bondale

SEPTEMBER 12, 2022

For those who might be wondering where my usual weekly article is, I’m taking a brief writing hiatus over the next few weeks to focus on my election campaign for Welland Ward 4 city councilor. Along with pounding the pavement and knocking on doors, I will be writing a few brief articles in support of my platform as part of my marketing campaign.

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Kiron Bondale

SEPTEMBER 4, 2022

While the phrase “quiet quitting” might have been popularized recently, the behavior has been with us for a long time. For those of us who are Seinfeld fans, you’ll remember the many creative ways in which George Costanza would do either no work or the absolute bare minimum to avoid getting fired. When we are considering operational work, quiet quitting is putting in the least effort to perform the standard responsibilities of one’s role such that required performance mea

Performance Measurement 194

Performance Measurement Leadership Risk Management Risk 194

Kiron Bondale

AUGUST 28, 2022

The reason the title of this post is in quotes is that this is a frequently asked question in both the projectmanagement.com discussion groups and PMI’s LinkedIn Project, Program, and Portfolio Management group. I, along with a number of other contributors, have seen and responded to it sufficient times that I felt it would be worth sharing my thoughts with my readership.

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Certification PMI Leadership Initiating 347

Kiron Bondale

AUGUST 14, 2022

Baseball is a sport with something for everyone. Whether you are a statistician inspired by Moneyball, a foodie craving the hot dogs and popcorn, or a kid enjoying the pure sound of the ball hitting the bat’s sweet spot, it is hard to not appreciate some aspect of the game. While I haven’t played baseball in more than three decades and don’t watch the sport on TV, attending a couple of our local intercounty team’s games recently has rekindled my interest in the game.

Risk Management 346

Risk Management Risk Monitoring Leadership 346

Kiron Bondale

AUGUST 7, 2022

Like many other home-bound folks, we added a furry family member early in the pandemic. Tux is a two and a half year old Shih Tzu and, like all dogs, has managed to fully integrate into all aspects of our daily lives. While he has completed the first level of doggy training (and graduated top dog within his cohort!), over the past two years, he has taught me a few lessons in leadership and project management which are worth sharing.

Energy 177

Energy Leadership 177

Kiron Bondale

JULY 31, 2022

The final (pre-election) article in my series covering my election run for city councilor of Ward 4 in Welland, Ontario shares some of the key risks I’ve identified with this project and how I’m responding to them. In general, most projects will have two broad categories of risks – those which relate to the delivery of the project itself and those which relate to the outcomes from the project.

2018 177

2018 Risk Leadership Budget 177

Kiron Bondale

JULY 17, 2022

Last year I wrote three articles about the project management tools and techniques I used for managing our inter-city relocation. Every four years, the municipalities within the province of Ontario hold elections for city council, the role of mayor, school board trustees and regional councillors. With the elections coming up this October, I decided a few weeks ago to run for one of the two city councillor roles within my ward in Welland (for more information about my platform, feel free to visit

PMI 194

PMI Leadership Initiating 194

Kiron Bondale

JULY 10, 2022

Whether you call them Scrums, standups or huddles, one way to plan-as-you-go with an adaptive approach is to hold coordination events on a regular basis to ensure that everyone is working in an aligned manner and on the most important work. One of the more common topics for such events is to discuss the backlog of short term team work. But such discussions can be held in a few different ways.

PMI 177

PMI Leadership Risk Management SCRUM 177

Kiron Bondale

JUNE 19, 2022

One of the distinguishing characteristics of project work is that we are usually expected to deliver value in uncertain conditions while facing multiple constraints. While it is important for a team to understand the external constraints they have and to define realistic plans based on those, it is also advisable that they have an idea of the relative priority of these constraints before making delivery commitments.

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Finance PMI Budget Leadership 320

Kiron Bondale

JUNE 5, 2022

Most project managers will include some contingency reserves within their budget to offset the negative financial impacts of realized risks. Determining how much to put aside for a rainy day might be done from a top-down method such as using a flat percentage derived from past projects (e.g. low complexity projects will have 10% contingency whereas higher complexity ones will have 25% contingency) or a bottom-up approach based on assessing and aggregating the expected monetary value of the finan

Risk Management 194

Risk Management Risk PMI Budget 194

Kiron Bondale

MAY 1, 2022

Whether we are looking at project or operations, understanding what progress has been made with the individual work items owned by your team is part of a normal day or week’s work for most leaders. This information is critical to using tools such as earned value management and information radiators such as burn down or burn up charts. But how you ask for work item updates will influence the quality of the work performance data you receive.

PMI 194

PMI Influencer Leadership 194

Kiron Bondale

APRIL 24, 2022

Whether you call them work boards, Scrum boards or Kanban boards, visualizing work using physical boards or online tools is a common practice for both operational and project teams. Such boards can provide a number of benefits including: Helping team members to see what work remains to be done Giving them an opportunity to pull work items at their pace as capacity frees up Focusing the team’s attention on blocked work items Providing stakeholders with a lightweight, pull-based method of un

PMI 333

PMI SCRUM Leadership Agile 333

Kiron Bondale

APRIL 17, 2022

In the project management world, being a vigilante is rarely advisable. Managing a project without proper authorization is not keeping Gotham or your company safe. And the Commissioner Gordon of your organization is more likely to put you in Arkham Asylum than congratulate you for showing initiative. So what prompted this week’s Dark Knight analogy?

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PMI Leadership Initiating Governance 347

Kiron Bondale

APRIL 3, 2022

If you ever find yourself wanting to inject some energy into a cross-functional gathering of delivery staff and stakeholders, ask for their opinion on estimates. For every person who adamantly insists that estimates are needed to support proper governance, someone else will argue that the inherent wrongness of an estimate and how estimates are abused will wipe out any benefits of defining them.

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Estimate 2012 Governance Government 345

Kiron Bondale

MARCH 27, 2022

In 2003, Barry Boehm and Richard Turner coined the acronym C.R.A.C.K. to remind us of the key characteristics of an effective Product Owner: C ollaborative – Are they able and willing to negotiate with stakeholders about needs, wants and priorities to come up with an optimal product scope? R epresentative – Are they able to “walk a mile in the shoes” of a given stakeholder to help team members and others understand the context behind a particular need?

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2003 PMI Influencer SCRUM 347

Kiron Bondale

MARCH 20, 2022

One of the clichés about Scrum is that it is “easy to understand but difficult to master” The first part of that is obvious with the Scrum Guide is only eleven pages (if you don’t count the title page, purpose and table of contents). There are three roles, three outputs and four events (five if you include sprints as an event but I prefer not to as the whole idea of events within events makes me nauseous).

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SCRUM PMI Software Review Leadership 355

Kiron Bondale

FEBRUARY 27, 2022

Similar to my previous article, this topic stemmed from a discussion I had with the learners of the PMP preparatory course I taught this week. While presenting the project risk management knowledge area from the PMBOK framework, when I indicated that while in our daily conversations risks are usually threats there can be positive risks as well, I was met with some disbelief and skepticism.

Risk 334

Risk Risk Management PMI Construction 334

Kiron Bondale

FEBRUARY 13, 2022

One of my parents’ sayings which used to irritate me when I was much younger was “Act your age!” In those days, it was usually a critique of some immature behavior or action on my part. As project managers, we usually are “acting our age” but might there be some benefits in channeling the child within us? See the forest from the trees.

Leadership 348

Leadership 348

Kiron Bondale

FEBRUARY 6, 2022

When we consider the benefits of non-solo working approaches such as pair programming or mobbing, the ones which normally come to mind are related to improvements in the speed or quality of delivery. The old adage “two heads are better than one” applies as we are usually able to get more work completed faster and with fewer defects. And by injecting variety by having participants alternate between different roles frequently, we also reduce the likelihood of fatigue.

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Influencer Leadership Defining Agile 333

Kiron Bondale

JANUARY 30, 2022

Having recently finished Adam Grant’s latest book, Think Again, I decided to read his first book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. Like all of his books, Adam provides good insights into our interactions with others along with multiple examples and case studies supporting his assertions. In case you haven’t read the book, Adam believes that people will default to one of three stances: takers, matchers or givers.

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Leadership Risk Risk Management 333