Project Management Articles

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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Jeff Patton presenting at AgileIndy 2024

Agile Indy 2024 Trip Report

Agile Indy 2024 From the AgileIndy site: AgileIndy is a user group devoted to raising awareness, acceptance, and support to people who explore and apply agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable. This year’s conference took place on Friday October 18th at 502 E Carmel Dr, Carmel, […]
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Five Strategies for a Happy and Healthy Software Maintenance Team

Software Maintenance Teams provide a broad array of services, customized to the industries they support. As a software development consultancy, our portfolio includes industries like energy, aerospace, healthcare, medical devices, precision agriculture, and others. The products we build live on Desktop, Embedded, Mobile, Web, and Cloud platforms. With such a diversity of industries and platforms, […]
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New Leads Need The Engagement Chronicle

On the last day of a 20 month-long project, my customer asked me, “Could you give a brief overview of everything you guys have done for us over the last couple of years?” 😅 As a new lead, I hadn’t thought of starting an engagement chronicle until closer to the end of the project. By […]
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From Terrible Things Come Innovation

As a software architect, I do what I can to stay abreast of the world around me. As new technologies, design patterns, and so on emerge, I try to learn enough about them to make informed decisions on where they might prove useful or if I can safely ignore them. I think about their relevance […]
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The Point of Particularly Personal Personas

The Agile software development movement has a concept called user personas. During a project’s spin-up, developers are encouraged to create these personas as representative users. A typical persona may be “Victor the Vice President”. Victor is a VP at his company. He will use the software for high-level data reporting, but not data entry. On […]
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SEP hex pattern overlay of person working on laptop

Fire the Firefighters

Are there fires occurring on your projects? You know the ones: We have a major delivery coming, and the testers just found 12 new defects. The user study uncovered a missing feature, and we were just about ready for delivery. Management changed the direction of the project halfway through. Oh, and, by the way, project […]
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Beware of the Simple Things

Beware of the Simple Things: 3 Flags to Look Out for in Domains Your new client already has a requirements document, and has been doing work in the domain for 10 years. They use simple concepts: reports, studies, projects, updates, project IDs, owners. They ‘just’ want to transfer their Access data into a relational database, […]
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Getting the Most Value with a Development Partner

What is software development? When we say software we typically mean a software product to sell to a market or a system to increase productivity. In both cases, doesn’t the customer have some idea of the cost and potential value before the project is initiated? If the initial estimated cost versus the expected value (Rate […]
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The 30 Second Standup

The Three Pillars of Standup Meetings: What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? What is blocking your progress? Everyone stands in a circle and takes their turn answering the questions. The whole meeting should last only a few minutes and gets everyone of the same page. But when you consider all the […]
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