The last couple of years has seen a wholesale shift in development methodologies among the Fortune 1000 companies from Waterfall to Agile. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Agile revolution that has been brewing in small companies, startups and web companies for the last decade and a half has finally arrived in […]
Tag: successful projects
Building Credibility by Meeting Commitments
As a business analyst who works with a lot of different project teams, one of the things I must do with each team is to build my credibility. I need to have the team trust me, believe in my deliverables, etc. And with each new team I work with, I must build my credibility with […]
Managing Product Backlogs in Diverse Agile Environments
Managing a Product Backlog when there is only one development team in an organization creating one solution at a time is relatively straight forward. However, large enterprises have multiple development teams creating a multitude of solutions with interdependencies between them. Managing product backlogs in these situations becomes very tricky, especially when it comes to prioritizing […]
Customer Onboarding: The Solution to User Engagement Crisis
Reading the NYT review of the new Apple Watch, I’m reminded of what it was like to first use an iPhone. Having cracked all the shrink-wrap and pulled apart each of the black and white paper boxes that include instructions no human would ever read, and there it was, a shiny, all-black obelisk. Like the […]
Homer Simpson, Difficult Stakeholder
I am a firm believer that any situation in life or in business can be traced to an episode of either The Simpsons or Seinfeld. In The Simpsons season 2 episode “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou,” the patriarch of the Simpson family designs a car, which provides a surprisingly sophisticated look into project team dynamics. […]
Don’t Begin UAT Until…
As projects run long and budgets get tight, the first thing that gets squeezed is testing. Even with the best of intentions, the planning, design, and development phases often go longer than expected. In order to meet that precious target rollout date, testing can get rushed. However, it is really important that testing is done […]
Long Distance Agile – How Good Requirements Documentation Overcomes the Problems of Distance and Disconnected Agile Teams
In the last three months or so, I have been approached by a number of analysts and developers struggling with the problems of working on geographically dispersed Agile teams. In a majority of the situations, the team members are scattered in countries on different sides of the globe with a minimum of 6 hours or […]
Using Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Features in Project Success Measurements
As I pointed out in a prior post on project success measurements, overall project success and the success of the related IT development effort can be mutually exclusive of each other. A business can achieve the objectives for a certain initiative regardless of whether the related IT effort succeeds or not. Similarly, an IT initiative […]
Productive Strategies – Make Downtime Count!
We all rely on the internet in some form on a regular basis – whether it’s to search for the nearest Tex-Mex restaurant or access your company’s SharePoint site. As an IT product manager, the internet’s role is an integral part of your average work week. Collaborating with colleagues, emailing stakeholders, researching important topics, downloading […]
Six Reasons Organizations Don’t Really Measure Project Success
If posed with this question, leaders of most organizations will put their own companies into the minority camp that actually measure project success. And in a vast majority of cases, they would be wrong. As I pointed out in a prior post on this topic, there are unfortunately as many ways of measuring success as […]
Why IT Needs to Know Business Problems
In a survey of over 500 senior business and technology executives done by the MIT Sloan School of Management, only 18% say that their company’s IT spending was “highly aligned with business priorities.” This means that in 82% of organizations, IT is consistently spending time and money on projects that were not addressing the actual […]
What Does Project Success Mean to You?
We have had a lot of discussions internally about “Measuring Project Success.” At an extremely simplistic level, ArgonDigital defines success as having been achieved when all the business objectives identified for the project are met. Each business objective will have one or more success metric(s) defined for it. So, when we are able to measure […]