Techn@gerial

There is no doubt that agile development techniques (of which there are several, Scrum, XP, Lean etc.) are an excellent way to empower a development team and enable them to really engage in the process of delivering software.  I will focus, such that I need to, on scrum; my preference.  These techniques delegate responsibility (not accountability) to the technical team, led by a scrum master.   This enables them to decide what is done when and how these decisions are made relating to any given set or state of the requirements.  The daily scrum meeting assigns priorities for work and addresses issues arising.  It is a technical forum where the team frankly raise and discuss their issues and experiences.  Scrum is usually composed of a series of sprints where requirements/features/stories (use cases) are solved in design and code.  But how do you surface this kind of project within your business and how do you report on the unknown?

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Is it a project?  Is it a programme?  This is a topic that is occupying my mind this week, on many levels.  There is a good short paper, Managing Successful Strategic Programmes to be found at www.nixonbrooke.com it addresses the fundamental differences between a programme and a project and provides some useful help for determining the difference.  The paper, by Ian Jones (some relation) can be found here.

On a more fundamental basis, I need to make some deterministic evaluations of what makes a Strategic Programme Manager rather than a well tooled Project Manager…

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Gerald lines up his ducks and starts to breathe life into Pro* Management service offerings. Watch his space…

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I’ve never really used the project management templates in Visio until recently. I was looking for a non-MSProject tool to build a gantt chart and something more illustrative than just a spreadhseet. The Project Schedule template set contains an item called a Gantt Chart Frame. It prompts for the number of tasks and the default timescale for the chart. You can then fill in the blanks and even add milestones and dependencies. The output is pretty good.

So why not use MSProject? Well, this picture isn’t a project plan, so if you don’t want to legitimize what is a forecast or a “guess-timate” it may help illustrate your thinking.

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Why is it so difficult to accurately determine the path of any given software development project? What are the constituent aspects that create uncertainty and inject risk? Why do software development projects invariably end up exasperating senior management? Why do they slip?

Quite simply, software development projects are different to other projects. The mass of moving parts, different people, legacy support and integration and a whole range of other components and dependencies can be mind boggling.

Software is intrinsically complex. To the untrained eye, code and software architecture is quite literally like a foreign language. It can be learnt however, and some people have a natural aptitude for the work. But, as with any learnt skill, capability comes in degrees, people vary enormously and in this particular field of work, this variation makes a big difference when trying to plan for delivery. This article outlines some of these variables and how to prevent them being an issue.

Continue Reading » Software project entropy

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