Project Management Essentials

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Managing Project Assumptions & Risks

Project Management Essentials

We make hundreds of assumptions and take small risks daily. Without them, we would spend innumerable hours worrying about everything. We assume our car will start. Our air conditioner will work. The weather forecast is accurate. These daily assumptions are banal. Recovering from these risks may be inconvenient but not horribly impactful. Project assumptions and risks are not as casual.

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Project Success: Implementation AND Adoption

Project Management Essentials

Software projects have two measures of success. First, building and implementing working software. Second, having people use and adopt it. Project managers tend to focus their attention on delivering the application. But the project’s real success rests on user adoption. Once, I led a large project. The application was delivered on-time, on-budget, and with the documented scope.

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Agile & Waterfall: Fitting Round Pegs into Square Holes

Project Management Essentials

Large enterprises and government agencies increasingly turn to Agile for their software projects. This is a difficult shift, with many struggling to fit their new round agile pegs into their existing square waterfall holes. Cultural, structural, and procedural impediments make “being agile” a challenge. Agilists may be critical and call this “fragile-agile” or “agile-fall.” We should commend these.

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Everyday Agile Practices

Project Management Essentials

Agile seems like a mystery to many. It has an unfamiliar vocabulary and practices. To outsiders, it feels like an exclusive club. However, when we step back and inspect agile, we see that it follows common, recognizable patterns from our daily lives. Imagine it is Thursday evening. Your family is planning the upcoming weekend. There is a fixed amount of time and many things to do.

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Project Management: Principles, Practices & Context

Project Management Essentials

Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life searching in vain for a unifying theory of physics. The project management profession has had a similar quest—defining a methodology, set of practices, or principles that could successfully guide any project. Like physics and nature, project management is ubiquitous. Projects address simple, complicated, and complex problems.

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Adapt and Grow: The Complete Guide to Agile Project Management Workflows

Project Management Essentials

An Agile workflow is a timeline of steps you need to start, work, and finish an Agile project. Agile workflows break projects into short, repeated phases. Teams use these cycles to seek customer feedback and add updates to the deliverable. Workflow phases or sprints last from one week to three months, during which time teams commit to finishing a limited set of tasks.

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The Project Charter Lays the Foundation

Project Management Essentials

The project charter is a foundational deliverable created during the project’s initiation phase. The charter documents the project’s purpose, planned direction, and what is initially known. It may be called a charter, proposal, grant, or request. It may be a formal contract or a less formal document. Regardless of the format, articulating the project’s intent is invaluable and harder than expected.