User Stories can (and should) completely replace Business Requirements on all projects — After almost 40 years of believing in the value of good Business Requirements, I am really beginning to understand what User Stories have to offer. It certainly could be argued that it’s taken me a really long time to get to this place, but perhaps I can partly rationalize this…

Could Choosing our Way of Working (WoW) revolutionize project results in all types of organizations? — A couple of years ago I wrote a Project Methodology Series in BlueProject (Project Methodology in 2020: :Project Methodology in 2020 (Part I), Project Methodology in 2020 (Part II): Speaking Of Agile, Project Methodology in 2020 (Part III): Disciplined Agile? ). In setting out to write this series, I learned…

SkedPal might just pave the way for real world scheduling and execution of Task Assignments — Maybe you’re that Project Manager (PM) who just sent out a whole bunch of Resource Assignments for that Project Schedule you have just finished Baselining. Even though you’ve already obtained full formal approval from all of the Resource Managers for each of the resources assigned to your project, and even…

No Code Projects do not give you an excuse to abandon project management — We have all heard about “waterfall” Project Management, Agile Project Management, and Hybrid Project Management, but how do you manage a No-Code Project where the development is more like configuration and might, in the most complex scenario, require advanced formulas, multiple layers of mappings, and workflow? You won’t find a…

Discovering Team Topologies — When Tom Demarco and Tim Lister first published PeopleWare back in 1987, I was convinced that we would eventually have to change the way we ran our projects. There was no way we could ever become effective as project managers if we didn’t start thinking about better ways for people…

A review of Digital.ai’s 15th Annual State of Agile Report — For many older, experienced project management types like myself, Agile is a great and powerful beast, with many fine features to offer software development projects, but also can seem like a runaway train barreling toward more established project management techniques that have been focused for years on improving project management…

How a Brutally Honest Brand Map Can Get Your New Independent Venture Humming — After more than 20 years of running my professional services firm, I am convinced that for those of us in the GDI (Gosh Darn Independent) space, Brand Mapping is a critical first step in planning (or replanning) our ventures. Brand Mapping is a concept I’ve synthesized from various sources (Alan…

Welcome to Project Earth, where most work related things seem to end up becoming a project — In his November/December 2021 article for Harvard Business Review (The Project Economy Has Arrived), Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, a former Chairman of the Project Management Institute (PMI), argues that projects “are increasingly driving both short-term performance and long-term value creation” in companies both large and small, as opposed to the “advances in…

What’s happening to the traditional PM Role? — An interesting thing is happening in the Project Management trade right now. Are we are on our way to losing the traditional Project Manager (PM) role? …