Project Management Articles
Why Your Software Feature List Will Change (And That’s a Good Thing)
Every software consultant has experienced this moment: A client arrives with a detailed feature list, meticulously crafted and approved through multiple layers of their organization. They’ve secured funding, aligned stakeholders, and are ready to build. There’s just one problem—that list is going to change. Significantly. I recently managed a project that perfectly illustrated this reality. […]
Agile Indy 2024 Trip Report
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, IN 46032. A […]
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, […]
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 […]
Five Decisions Your Team Needs to Make Before Starting a Project
Huzzah! You got the project! Now what!? Here are some recommendations on what decisions you should make right now, before you start. 1. What’s the tech? Let’s start with the obvious one. Assuming you’ve decided to write some software, you’ll have to decide how to write it. Which programming language? Is your team going to […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
5 Benefits of Outsourcing Software Development
Outsourcing is the business practice where a company uses outside firms to do select projects and special work that might normally be performed within that company. Some examples of what might be outsourced (besides software development) include payroll processing, shipping and distribution, and accounting. You are essentially sending your work to be done by an […]