It’s Alive! My new Agile scope management tool is now live! It’s called Tactyle, in reference to its emphasis on touching and interacting with the content of your project. Other key design principles include: simple, effective, and fully-automated Earned Value – in keeping with my blog posts in recent years suitable for fixed price and/or fixed scope… Read More
Looking for beta testers for agile tool After years of thinking about it, and months of actually developing it, I’m now looking for beta testers for a brand new agile tool. If you like the sound of “Story Mapping + Big Visible Charts + Simplicity”, send me an email (address here), and I’ll reply with a link to the product. If you… Read More
Key Resources Here’s a brief summary of the key Earned Value resources on this blog: Earned Value in two sentences: Earned Value in a Nutshell Introduction, from a Agile perspective: Agile Charts Introduction, from a classic Earned Value Management (aerospace/DoD) perspective: Software Tech News article (was also re-printed in the PMI’s Measurable News) A comprehensive 30-page article,… Read More
Converting Apples to Oranges There are two common errors when forecasting the final cost of a project. One is to compare actual cost with planned cost. The other is to compare actual progress with planned progress. Both are wrong. Earned Value teaches us that the only valid measure is to compare actual cost with actual progress. This may seem… Read More
Agile 2011 Keynotes Look Good The three keynote presentations for Agile 2011 have been announced. I’m thrilled to see that two of them are on the people side of agile, rather than the technical side. Barbara Fredrickson will speak on how positive emotions feed a virtuous circle in the workplace, and Linda Rising will talk about how viewing ourselves as… Read More
Conversation with the Situation – a Software Example As I posted recently, professionals in many fields work by having a “conversation with the situation”. What does this really mean, in software development? To answer that question, I’ve decided to share a recent design episode from a system I’m working on. I’ll try to capture the full “conversation with the situation” – both my… Read More
Compliance to Spec Considered Unprofessional In keeping with the theme of this blog, which is “the neglected essentials of software development”, I’d like to share something I’ve learned recently. It’s about how Professional people in other fields think – people like architects, town planners and doctors.… Read More
10 Years Agile – a perspective from outside the room Recently Alistair Cockburn invited 32 agile practitioners to join him at the Snowbird ski resort, for a retrospective on the agile movement as a whole. I followed the event via Twitter, sitting under a sun umbrella here in the southern hemisphere, reading the tweets from the snow. The event was both a celebration of the… Read More
Earned Value Starter Kit At the end of my talk on Earned Value, I’ve been giving away the “Earned Value Starter Kit” that we put together at Optimation. It is a fairly simple spreadsheet, which makes it easier to get started with ‘lite’ Earned Value. In case you miss out on a copy, you can download it here. Thanks… Read More
Rules of the Green Line I draw usually draw Earned Value charts with the cost (AC) line in red, and the progress (EV) line in green. In this post, I’m going to outline some basic rules for getting a good “green line”. The recommendations in this post are for people doing “lite” Earned Value as described in my posts and… Read More