10 Years Agile – a perspective from outside the room February 19, 2011 | John Rusk | 4 Comments 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 December 5, 2010 | John Rusk | 1 Comment 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 September 29, 2010 | John Rusk 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
Programming Languages for Kids – time to go mobile September 18, 2010 | John Rusk | 4 Comments At the BarCamp following the NZCS 50th Anniversary Conference, there was an interesting discussion on programming languages for kids. It was suggested that the key players ( Phrogram, Small Basic, Scratch etc) don’t get it quite right. That rings true to me. Reflecting on this after the session, I realised the reason: When I was… Read More
Encyclopedia Article September 8, 2010 | John Rusk | 1 Comment This page provides shortcuts to my Earned Value article in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering. Link to online copy. As of 27 June 2011, you can purchase just the EV article (without having to buy the whole encyclopedia.) [Update, March 2013: the publishers seem to have reverted to selling it only as part of the… Read More
Recent Earned Value Posts of Interest July 8, 2010 | John Rusk Glen Alleman posted on the difficulty (or otherwise) of the maths in EVM, and several of us commented. He followed that with an example in which the maths is very simple, which I quite liked as an introduction to Earned Value. Marcin Niebudek wrote an article, in which he adds a budget line to an… Read More
Speaking on Earned Value at NZ Computer Society Conference July 2, 2010 | John Rusk I’ll be speaking at the New Zealand Computer Society’s 50th Anniversary Conference, on the topic of Earned Value Management. I’m looking forward to being part of an interesting conference, and hopefully helping to lift the profile of EVM in New Zealand. Link to presentation abstract ( The abstract’s reference to “Number 8 wire” may be… Read More
Earned Value in a Nutshell May 30, 2010 | John Rusk | 5 Comments I’ve been looking for a way to describe the “essence” of Earned Value Management (EVM). How can I describe the core of what EVM is about – without resorting to an impenetrable jungle of acronyms? This is particularly important when describing it to people outside EVM’s traditional strongholds of defense and aerospace. Outside those areas,… Read More
Added transcript to People Skills video May 28, 2010 | John Rusk This week’s “People Skills for Nerds” post now includes a written transcript of the talk. (For those who, like me, prefer to read than to watch videos 😉… Read More
People Skills for Nerds – a Summary Video May 22, 2010 | John Rusk | 3 Comments This video summarises they key points I aim to make in this blog, that people skills are: Important, and Learnable (with time and practice) The video is an edited extract of my talk at the AgileRoots conference, at Salt Lake City in 2009. For the benefit of people who, like me, prefer skim reading to… Read More