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Category Archives: Project Management

The perils of a schedule

Friday, August 14, 2009

We got this e-mail a few days ago from one of our readers: Hello, I bought your book, “Applied Software Project Management.” It seems very good overall, but I can’t get past the fact that your book seems to imply that software requirements come after the project plan/WBS/scheduling. Am I missing something? On page 40, [...]

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Taking stock of a failed project

Friday, July 24, 2009

Some projects just go wrong. It’s a fact of life. Projects go over budget, blow their schedules, squander their resources. Sometimes they go off the rails so spectacularly that there’s nothing you can do except (literally) pick up the pieces and try to learn whatever lessons you can so you don’t repeat the failure in [...]

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Iterative development is not unplanned development

Thursday, July 16, 2009

I got a great question from a software developer who also happens to be a fellow CMU alum. I have a question related to managing scope creep with respect to “on-going”/iterative development processes. I’m currently managing a project where we’re redesigning my application’s primary workflow. Simply put, the app is currently designed to have users [...]

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It’ll take about three weeks…

Thursday, March 20, 2008

If you’ve been reading our posts here, you probably noticed that we like to give our “Why Projects Fail” talk. (If you’re curious, here’s a link to the slides [PDF].) One reason we really like it is that it seems to go over well with a lot of different audiences, from hard-core architects and programmers [...]

Also filed in Estimation | | Comments (1)

PMI Mass Bay – Thanks for a great time!

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The folks at the PMI Mass Bay chapter contacted me and Jenny a while back (using our convenient contact page) and invited us to give a talk at a chapter meeting, which we did last Thursday. We had a great time, and met some really interesting people. They’ve got one of the biggest PMI chapters [...]

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