Successful Projects

So I decided to do a post between knowing when your project is in trouble and action. I thought it might be nice to discuss the causes of troubled projects.
Almost always people issues rarely if ever technology issues!
Failure to plan, or failure to follow the plan
Lack of risk management
Poor communication, both within and without [...]

As I discuss project recovery in more detail I thought it would be nice to share how you know when a project is in trouble. This info comes right out of the materials I gave SoWY Department of Health. What was interesting is that they could identify with many of these symptoms of a project [...]

Yesterday I met with the IT Director for the Wyoming Department of Health. Ostensibly we were meeting to discuss me coming to Cheyenne as a contractor to help them turn around the Wyoming Client Information System – a project with which they have been having a great deal of trouble. It was pretty obvious from [...]

I got an email today from the Agile University in which were listed upcoming classes and the locations of those classes. I was surprised and encouraged to see that a couple of the classes were sold out. It got me to thinking about the current state of the economy and whether businesses send their folks [...]

Mark Boulton wrote a post recently titled “Drupal.org, Design Iterations, and Designing in the open“. I’ve been thinking about this post for a while because at my work – Envysion – we are constantly trying to determine the best way to incorporate feedback from our users in our web application.
We certainly don’t have the [...]

This is a major issue with almost every team running a project using an Agile methodology. Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has a terrific post on his blog about how to handle those tasks that pop up during every iteration that have no specific stories associated to them.

I just had my final pre-engagement meeting with a prospective new client – a major player in the telecom infrastructure arena.  I was brought in to do an analysis of the current state of their Project Management to determine why they were experiencing difficulties in several key areas.  Their problem statement to me was, “We [...]

Larry Cone just published an article titled, Letter to a PM – My Guilty Secret about his loathing of Project Management software. He expresses in a clear and concise manner how most PMs feel about PM software – Microsoft Project in particular.
Larry talks about how difficult it is to correct problems in MS Project once [...]