In This Issue:
From the Editor
Geof Lory on Canceling Noise
Agile Corner:
- Once Upon a Time...
- Happy Ever After 2: Feature-gate...
Featured Templates
- Maybe I Left It In My Other Pants
- Made Possible by a Generous Grant from the Mom Corporation
- What's It Worth To Ya?
Related Templates
Project Practitioners Blog
Featured Bundle: Software Requirements Capture and Management
Where's ProjectConnections?
Corporate Subscriptions
From the Editor
If there's one word that describes the current business environment (other than "volatile") it's probably risk-averse. (Yes, I cheated, but only a little.) There just isn't enough leeway to allow mistakes like developing the wrong features, pursuing the wrong projects, or listening to the wrong signals. This week, we've honed in on resources that will help you agree on project scope, keep your projects on track, and most of all, stay tuned in to what your customers really need you to deliver. Even if you're midway through a project or careening toward the finish line, it pays to make sure you're measuring progress against these critical project goals.
With all this discussion of features and scope, it's appropriate that we're launching a few new features of our own this month. If you're looking for practical information, tools, and techniques that can be used with agile methodologies, you'll find them in our new Agile Project Management Index. We'll highlight the newest agile information on the site there and in the Agile Corner in this newsletter as we build out these much-requested resources for the site. Visitors to the site will also notice a new Blog tab, where we feature (appropriately enough) our Project Practitioners blog, a collaborative exercise staffed with practicing project managers who have ideas, tools, and techniques they want to share.
We'd love to hear what you think of both of these features: whether you like the formats, other topics and methodologies you'd like to see addressed, and any other feedback you have. Lay it on us!
Project Practitioners Blog
The blog format we adopted for our regular columnists went over well, so we decided it was time to open the field. Last week we launched the Project Practitioners blog: a practical view of common issues, and how to deal with them, as well as tips and techniques from the field in the world of project, program, and portfolio management. Bloggers include some ProjectConnections regulars, as well as project managers from across the spectrum. We're excited about this developing conversation, and we hope you'll share your thoughts too. Here's what's been on our bloggers' minds lately:
Brandon Carlson: Story prioritization in the blink of an eye
DeAnna Burghart on the value of peanuts
Kent McDonald on the Yeah-buts of Change
Featured Article
Cancelling Noise, by Geof Lory
Several years ago when I was doing a lot of traveling, I bought a pair of Bose headphones that are marketed as "noise-canceling." What an interesting concept. Block out the static and noise and allow the meaningful and valuable information to come through. On long trips, especially on airplanes, they have been a lifesaver. I wondered, if they work so well on planes, what about on projects? Projects and teams are full of meaningless noise that could use a little canceling.
Unfortunately, the noise on projects is not so easily managed, but it can be done. The first step in the process is to distinguish the static and noise from the useful and meaningful information. If you skip this step, you risk either plugging your ears and missing everything or becoming comfortably numb and ignoring meaningful information. Operating in this self-protective oblivion can be as hazardous to your health as standing next to the speakers at an AC/DC concert. (OK, I'm dating myself now.) Equally wasteful is reacting to the noise as if it is meaningful and spending precious energy and time dealing with it. Read more »
Agile Corner
Whether or not you agree with it, agile is a hot topic in development these days. You may be all over it like a Scrum team on FUD, or you may just be curious what it's all about and why (or if) it matters to your organization. Either way, our new Agile Project Management Index will collect agile resources, articles, and blog postings from across our site into one place, so you can thumb through them more easily and select the tools and techniques that are best for your team.
Once Upon a Time... - Agile Technique Brief: Requirements Cards – SPECIALThis Premium resource is free to registered Members until October 15, 2008
Agile methodologies like Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) often build on "user stories" as a way of capturing and tracking feature requirements. Kent McDonald, who authored this technique brief, prefers to call them requirements cards in order to include customers and stakeholders. Whichever term you prefer, the idea is to create only enough requirements detail to scope the project, without burying the team or the schedule in exhaustive feature details that are likely to change anyway. As a bonus, this technique also includes a means of describing what "done" means for that particular feature, by describing potential scenarios and the expected result. We can't promise happy ever after, but at least you'll know where the treasure is hidden.
Happy Ever After 2: Feature-gate... - Agile Technique Brief: Project Value Model – SPECIALThis Premium resource is free to registered Members until October 15, 2008
Project teams are inundated with information on how to build things, but much less on how to decide what things to build. Business dumps the problem on the project team ("requirements gathering") and Agile methodologies lob it back to business ("product owner"). Is it any wonder teams sometimes build things that have no relationship to what the business needs, or things that the boss's cousin asked for, or even nothing at all? Project value models make this determination a collaborative effort between the groups. This brief explains how to identify, agree on, and organize key pieces of information like project purpose, risks, constraints, and assumptions and use it to prioritize projects and features throughout development. Think of it as a gateway to sensible feature selection.
Featured Templates
Maybe I Left It in My Other Pants - Completion Criteria Guidelines – PREMIUM
It's the eleventh hour on your project; do you know where your finish line is? Guessing at what your customers will accept as a completed feature isn't a winning strategy. Better to begin with the end in mind, and start creating a list of completion criteria early in the project so everyone knows what they're shooting for. The earlier you begin it the more it will change (along with everything else about the project), but at least the changes will be visible, traceable, and probably more sensible. Then, when your customer asks if it's done yet, you'll have the answers in your hip pocket instead of shooting from the hip.
Made Possible by a Generous Grant from the Mom Corporation - Project Budget and Cost Tracking Formats – PREMIUM
If your project goes south in a big way, will you be able to hit up a generous benefactor for a quick bail-out? Yeah, we thought as much. That's why it pays to watch the books from the beginning; proper budgeting is as important to project scope as feature requirements and schedules are. It doesn't matter that you're not sure how much it will cost yet; you weren't sure how long it would take when you started drafting your schedule. Besides, the idea isn't to carve things in stone, but to use the budget as a planning and scoping activity that evolves with the projects. Budgeting and scheduling can feed each other: a list of anticipated expenses may remind you of overlooked tasks like testing, which may remind you of other cross-functional dependencies, which can remind you of still other budgeting requirements hey, Mom?!
What's It Worth to Ya? - Opportunity Screening Worksheet – PREMIUM
Brilliance or madness? Bear or bull? Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference, and in the wrong environment even great ideas can be a bad risk. This worksheet will help you determine if an idea is worth enough to the company to justify a product development project. Evaluate the market, company capability, risks, returns, and other factors to decide whether to go ahead and why. Not only will you make better decisions about your portfolio, your team will understand from the outset what critical factors made the project worth doing, and thus are probably the most important to maintaining the project's health and relevance to the organization. This worksheet is written for analyzing a specific product idea, but with some minor modifications and deletions it can also be used for benefits analysis of other projects.
Related Templates
Looking for more resources to help you control your project's size, scope, and requirements? Try these:
Product Definition: Critical Success Factors - A checklist of critical success factors for defining a product, and a worksheet for assessing the current state of your project's information.Product Scope Definition: Statement of Work - One approach to documenting high-level project objectives and key parameters in a concise document. This document should be only about two pages long.
Project Vision Example: Defining a Software Release Life Cycle - Curious what a vision document looks like when a team agrees on the major points ahead of time? This example comes from a mid-sized product development company that created a Software Release Life Cycle (SRLC) process to manage million lines-of-code software releases.
How an IT Team Broke Free From the Requirements Morass - What do you do when you're 6 months into a supposed 9-month project, and the team is still gathering requirements? Find out how this team broke free from a requirements gathering process that had become a barrier to project progress.
Featured Bundle
Software Requirements Capture and Management
Need to bring some sanity and prioritization to your requirements management? 16 detailed templates, guidelines, and case studies are combined in this package to help you identify what the project needs to create and why. The resources included cover requirements from the customers and the business, assist with defining requirements at the project level and below, and provide guidelines and templates for managing requirements changes in an organized fashion. Requests for Proposals are included too. If you are looking for a way to capture and express requirements thoroughly without driving everyone thoroughly mad, this bundle can help.
ProjectConnections bundles are a purchase avenue for members who can't or don't wish to maintain a Premium subscription, but they also provide a convenient licensing mechanism for project managers or PMO heads looking to supplement their project office resources. If you'd like your whole department or organization to benefit from this or any other ProjectConnections bundle, we'd be glad to provide licensing terms. Find out more »
ProjectConnections bundles allow access to our templates without a Premium subscription, but they also provide a convenient licensing mechanism for project managers or PMO heads looking to supplement their project office resources. If you'd like your whole department or organization to benefit from this or any other ProjectConnections bundle, we'd be glad to provide licensing terms. Just email deanna@projectconnections.com for more information.
Where's ProjectConnections?
There's still time to register for Carl Pritchard's new PMP® Exam Prep course, October 1-2 in Gaithersburg, Maryland. If you're in the area (or could be) and will be taking The Test at some point, you can find out more on Carl's website.
Kimberly Wieflingis back in Tokyo this week for the Global Management Program, October 3-4, and Leadership for Breakthrough Results, October 6-7.Randy Englund and co-author Alfonso Bucero (now a ProjectConnections blog contributor) will be in Denver, Colorado, at PMI SeminarsWorld October 22-23. Their seminar will address "Creating Excellence in Project Management."
The October 29 growBOLD Lunch Meeting will feature ProjectConnections founder Cinda Voegtli discussing "The In's and Out's of Virtual Teams: What does it take to make it work?" This lunch meeting in Redwood City is open the public (non-members of growBOLD pay a small fee): http://www.growbold.com/growbold/bold-lunch-meeting-octobe.html. Earlier in the month, Cisco employees will get to hear her address "The Company's Objectives, Your Milestones, and Individual Ownership of Results."Corporate Subscriptions and Licensing
Want your team members to have their own access to templates and how-to resources for their project work? Need to share documents and deliverables beyond your project team? We make it easier with affordable corporate subscriptions and licensing. Detailed information regarding corporate options is available online. Give your whole team, or even the entire organization, cost-effective access to our comprehensive online library of resources. You already know how helpful it's been for you. Now it's time to share with everyone else. Find out more »Not sure if corporate terms apply to you? Check out our licensing terms at the top of our Terms of Service page, in refreshingly ordinary, everyday English.