Browsing All posts tagged under »Project Management«

Stand up meetings – not just for software or Agile anymore

February 20, 2012 by

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Stand up.  Sit down.  Which is better for the team, productivity, your company? The trend is stand up for a short burst of action and accountability among all types of business teams.  A hall-mark of rapid software development (1990′s) and Agile (manifesto in 2001 onward) the stand up meeting has progressed rapidly beyond software, to… [Read more…]

TAPUniversity’s Online Learning System has moved.

October 8, 2011 by

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Exciting news. TAPUniversity has partnered with gnomio to launch its learning management system ahead.  Additional must-have features include test bank expansion and knowledge sharing tools.  An innovator in online project management training since 2006, this partnership ensures our delivery keeps paced with your learning needs! Just click on the TAPUniversity LMS* on the menu to… [Read more…]

Celebration! 100,000 readers!

May 17, 2011 by

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Time for a little celebration.  Today the TAPUniversity blog surpassed 100,000 visits or reads.  Over the last two years our blog readership and contributions have grown steadily.  Several hundred professionals check in each day and explore over 400 articles and growing.    We’ll continue to publish and hope you’ll share in our exploration of the Management… [Read more…]

Pragnalysis team announce launch of free Requirements Management Software Tool – “ReqLine”

May 16, 2011 by

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On medium and large scale projects, requirements management can become a difficult overhead.  Teams that rely on spreadsheet and word-processing software to create and manage requirements documents often find it difficult to maintain the traceability and inter-dependencies between requirements.   We all know the value of tracing, tracking and maintaining our requirements documents, but until now… [Read more…]

Business Analysis Technique #4 – Business Rules Analysis

April 29, 2011 by

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Business Rules.  Universal definitions or process descriptions that transcend a single use case or process flow.  A little bit bigger than a glossary definition (such as income range, gender, ethnicity) but not quite a usage scenario in its own right.  Business rules as they’re refined, adapted and updated are invaluable requirements assets – they really… [Read more…]

Business Analysis Technique #20 – Problem Tracking

April 21, 2011 by

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Problems, issues, bugs, defects, action items, punch list, clean up tables – so many synonymous terms for the same underlying concept – tracking known “stuff” and making sure it gets resolved before a product or service is released.   While risk management concerns the known- unknown, management reserves address unknown  -unknown, problem tracking is smack dab… [Read more…]

How to Find Where New Process is Really Needed

March 31, 2011 by

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It’s great to learn new models. I LOVE models. I like to think about how they can be applied, and I get excited about both the predictive ability of models and the capacity for goodness that exists when a model is well executed. But I’ve learned that the reality is that you will never be… [Read more…]

Project Health Check : 5 serious project warning signs

March 19, 2011 by

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As experienced change practitioners, I’m sure we’ve all worked on projects that have been difficult.  The unfortunate truth is that some projects gain so much momentum, they become “too big to fail”.  These projects steamroll their way through organizations, and have a tendency to displace anyone that dares to challenge them. Sometimes when working closely… [Read more…]

Business Analysis Technique #3 – Brainstorming

March 1, 2011 by

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The whiteboard.  The dry eraser.  The multi-color pens.  The overbearing meeting participant.  Those four things often come together when thinking of brainstorming.  It’s a technique among multiple management nexus disciplines and at the heart of agile, business analysis and project management. It can produce great results from a team. The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge… [Read more…]

Time for a quick celebration – 400 posts!

February 16, 2011 by

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I  wanted to share a little milestone. We reached 400 posts yesterday. Our blog is primarily targeted for education, learning and conversation. While we do need some money to keep the lights on, we try to keep the commercial pitches and “monentization” to a minimum.  Thank you everyone who has participated, read and engaged with… [Read more…]

Agile Principle 12 – Team reflects, tunes and adjusts

February 15, 2011 by

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The last principle of the Agile Manifesto provides for learning and adjustment by the team. This adjustment allows for continuous process improvement.  Teams don’t allow themselves to become stagnant or stale – they change and become better.  The manifesto doesn’t proscribe how often and allows some leeway.  The definition of “at regular intervals” provides sufficient… [Read more…]

Your project needs a maverick.

February 14, 2011 by

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Project teams are complex and it’s essential that the team works together productively to achieve the end goal.  Every so often, there will be a ‘project maverick’ that upsets the balance. Perhaps they ignore the plan, or escalate an issue straight to the CEO.  Mavericks are often seen as a Project Managers worst nightmare, as… [Read more…]

Agile Principle 11 – Self Organizing teams produce best architectures, requirements and design

February 14, 2011 by

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Agile manifesto – principles number 1 – 10 were ones I could embrace or at least accept.  And yes I know it’s your 10th birthday this month.  But really, number 11 is a difficult one for this control oriented, project management/ manager type to swallow.  You’re saying that self-organizing teams can get it done?  Yeah… [Read more…]

Agile Principle 9 – Agility is a result of technical excellence and good design

February 12, 2011 by

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The ninth principle of agile brings in important aspects of enterprise architecture and system design. Technical excellence is a board term.  it can be applied to hardware, software, network infrastructure, process management, project management, programming, release management, etc.  I also think of enterprise architecture I hear technical excellence.  While Agile is change driven, that does… [Read more…]

Agile Principle 5 – Motivate, Support and Trust People

February 8, 2011 by

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Is it a radical concept, motivate, support and trust people?  No.  Not really. The Agile principle of building projects around motivated individuals is clearly a Theory Z , Y or Herzberg management approach — people want to achieve and when they do, advance that performance to even higher levels.  It doesn’t fit well with the… [Read more…]

Agile Principle 4 developers and business working directly together

February 7, 2011 by

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Unleashing your developer geeks on unsuspecting business people was quite risky in the 1990′s. Why those geeks may be a bit rough, un-kept and may spill the beans (truth).  They clearly have not transformed in “McDreamy” yet (Patrick Dempsey).  They’re still commuting to work on their lawn mower. Seems a little silly now.  The prevailing… [Read more…]

Agile Principle 2 – Changing Requirements

February 5, 2011 by

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Re·quire·ment n. 1. Something that is required; a necessity. 2. Something obligatory; a prerequisite.¹ Among the twelve principles of Agile, that one that evokes a good amount of debate is changing requirements, even late in development.  This contrasts from plan driven approaches to development that “freeze requirements” and lock those in through development and deployment.  … [Read more…]

Virtual Teams – Media Richness

January 31, 2011 by

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Various technologies have various levels of media richness. Media richness means communication media have varying capacities for resolving ambiguity, negotiating varying interpretations, and facilitating understanding. Media is said to be very rich when it provides: the availability of instant feedback; the capacity of the medium to transmit multiple cues such as body language, voice tone,… [Read more…]

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