Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
The adoption of Agile approaches has introduced new ways of thinking about Project Management, which impact Project Management Organizations in various ways. This paper divides the range of practices commonly found in Project Management Office (PMO) into Project Management, Program Management and Portfolio Management. It identifies how the introduction of Agile processes such as Scrum impacts the PMO.
Burn charts are a simple method to monitor work progress in Scrum. This article discusses the details of burn down and burn up charts: which units to measure, how to adapt to scope variations. He gives some guidelines on how to interpret burndown charts. He reminds that the chart should be objective and visible.
An Agile team reset occurs when an Agile team take a step back to review and relearn the foundation principles and practices of Scrum. Justin Hennessy presents in this article how he did it when a team he was coaching had successfully implemented the practices for Scrum but didn’t really understand the values or principles behind it.
Analyzing the bottleneck faced by a Scrum team, Mark Levison introduces in this blog post the concept of Skills Matrix. The Skill Matrix is a visual management tool that shows at a glance how much cross-training you have in your organization between different people and different tasks.
In this article, Elton Gao starts by giving us the definition of a good ScrumMaster: someone who knows Scrum well. He or she understands the do’s and don’ts and is familiar with related artifacts and tools. He or she knows how to run a daily Scrum, a planning/review/retrospective meeting and how to take advantages of related tools and so on. But is this enough?
The “rightsizing” of user stories occurring during the planning of the next sprint in Scrum is not always an easy task to perform. Inexperienced teams have difficulties to split user stories into smaller chunks that still deliver business value and would rather use technical criteria. In this blog post, “Specifications by Example” author Gojko Adzic provides a new approach to achieve this goal using the hamburger as a reference. You identify the tasks making up a user story. Then you use this breakdown to identify different levels of quality for each step and create vertical slices to identify smaller deliverables, thus creating your next sprint’s hamburger.
During Scrum adoption, people tend to get away from tasks and activities that they don’t like in traditional projects like documentation or writing proper code comments. In this article, a ScrumMaster shares his experience with a “no documentation” approach. He learned the hard way that minimal documentation is better than no documentation in Scrum projects. The team can decide on a case-by-case basis what level of documentation for which components and code logics is needed.
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