Manage It! : Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management

by Rothman, Johanna

• ISBN13: 9780978739249
• ISBN10: 0978739248
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-15
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

This book is a reality-based guide for modern projects. You'll learn how to recognise your project's potholes and ruts, and determine the best way to fix problemswithout causing more problems. Your project can't fail. That's a lot of pressure on you, and yet you don't want to buy into any one specific process, methodology, or lifecycle. Your project is different. It doesn't fit into those neat descriptions. Successful Project Management will show you how to beg, borrow, and steal from the best methodologies to fit your particular project. It will help you find what works best for you and not for some mythological project that doesn't even exist. Before you know it, your project will be on track and headed to a successful conclusion. New project managers won't fall into the trap of thinking that if they manage the Gantt, they can succeed. More seasoned project managers will find several new ways of looking at project problems they've encountered in the past.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xv
Preface	p. xvii
Starting a Project	p. 1
Define Projects and Project Managers	p. 1
Manage Your Drivers, Constraints, and Floats	p. 3
Discuss Your Project Constraints with Your Client or Sponsor	p. 6
Decide on a Driver for Your Project	p. 7
Manage Sponsors Who Want to Overconstrain Your Project	p. 9
Write a Project Charter to Share These Decisions	p. 11
Know What Quality Means for Your Project	p. 14
Planning the Project	p. 17
Start the Wheels Turning	p. 17
Plan Just Enough to Start	p. 18
Develop a Project Plan Template	p. 19
Define Release Criteria	p. 26
Use Release Criteria	p. 31
Using Life Cycles to Design Your Project	p. 35
Understanding Project Life Cycles	p. 35
Overview of Life Cycles	p. 36
Seeing Feedback in the Project	p. 40
Larger Projects Might Have Multiple Combinations of Life Cycles	p. 41
Managing Architectural Risk	p. 45
Paddling Your Way Out of a Waterfall	p. 47
My Favorite Life Cycles	p. 48
Scheduling the Project	p. 49
Pragmatic Approaches to Project Scheduling	p. 49
Select from These Scheduling Techniques	p. 51
Start Scheduling with a Low-Tech Tool	p. 54
Estimating the Work	p. 63
Pragmatic Approaches to Project Estimation	p. 63
Milestones Define Your Project's Chunks	p. 76
How Little Can You Do?	p. 78
Estimating with Multitasking	p. 78
Scheduling People to Multitask by Design	p. 79
Using Rolling-Wave Scheduling	p. 80
Deciding on an Iteration Duration	p. 81
Estimating Using Inch-Pebbles Wherever Possible	p. 83
Recognizing and Avoiding Schedule Games	p. 87
Bring Me a Rock	p. 87
Hope Is Our Most Important Strategy	p. 90
Queen of Denial	p. 92
Sweep Under the Rug	p. 95
Happy Date	p. 97
Pants on Fire	p. 99
Split Focus	p. 101
Schedule Equals Commitment	p. 103
We'll Know Where We Are When We Get There	p. 105
The Schedule Tool Is Always Right	p. 107
We Gotta Have It; We're Toast Without It	p. 110
We Can't Say No	p. 112
Schedule Chicken	p. 114
90% Done	p. 115
We'll Go Faster Now	p. 117
Schedule Trance	p. 119
Creating a Great Project Team	p. 121
Recruit the People You Need	p. 121
Help the Team Jell	p. 123
Make Your Organization Work for You	p. 126
Know How Large a Team You Need	p. 129
Know When to Add More People	p. 131
Become a Great Project Manager	p. 131
Know When It's Time to Leave	p. 134
Steering the Project	p. 143
Steer the Project with Rhythm	p. 143
Conduct Interim Retrospectives	p. 144
Rank the Requirements	p. 145
Timebox Requirements Work	p. 148
Timebox Iterations to Four or Fewer Weeks	p. 151
Use Rolling-Wave Planning and Scheduling	p. 152
Create a Cross-Functional Project Team	p. 155
Select a Life Cycle Based on Your Project's Risks	p. 156
Keep Reasonable Work Hours	p. 157
Use Inch-Pebbles	p. 158
Manage Interruptions	p. 159
Manage Defects Starting at the Beginning of the Project	p. 161
Maintaining Project Rhythm	p. 167
Adopt or Adapt Continuous Integration for Your Project	p. 167
Create Automated Smoke Tests for the Build	p. 169
Implement by Feature, Not by Architecture	p. 170
Get Multiple Sets of Eyes on Work Products	p. 175
Plan to Refactor	p. 176
Utilize Use Cases, User Stories, Personas, and Scenarios to Define Requirements	p. 178
Separate GUI Design from Requirements	p. 179
Use Low-Fidelity Prototyping as Long as Possible	p. 180
Managing Meetings	p. 183
Cancel These Meetings	p. 183
Conduct These Types of Meetings	p. 186
Project Kickoff Meetings	p. 187
Release Planning Meetings	p. 187
Status Meetings	p. 188
Reporting Status to Management	p. 193
Project Team Meetings	p. 194
Iteration Review Meetings	p. 195
Troubleshooting Meetings	p. 195
Manage Conference Calls with Remote Teams	p. 197
Creating and Using a Project Dashboard	p. 201
Measurements Can Be Dangerous	p. 201
Measure Progress Toward Project Completion	p. 204
Develop a Project Dashboard for Sponsors	p. 227
Use a Project Weather Report	p. 230
Managing Multisite Projects	p. 235
What Does a Question Cost You?	p. 236
Identify Your Project's Cultural Differences	p. 237
Build Trust Among the Teams	p. 238
Use Complementary Practices on a Team-by-Team Basis	p. 241
Look for Potential Multisite Project and Multicultural Problems	p. 249
Avoid These Mistakes When Outsourcing	p. 251
Integrating Testing into the Project	p. 255
Start People with a Mind-Set Toward Reducing Technical Debt	p. 255
Reduce Risks with Small Tests	p. 256
TDD Is the Easiest Way to Integrate Testing into Your Project	p. 257
Use a Wide Variety of Testing Techniques	p. 260
Define Every Team Member's Testing Role	p. 263
What's the Right Developer-to-Tester Ratio?	p. 267
Make the Testing Concurrent with Development	p. 273
Define a Test Strategy for Your Project	p. 273
System Test Strategy Template	p. 274
There's a Difference Between QA and Test	p. 276
Managing Programs	p. 279
When Your Project Is a Program	p. 279
Organizing Multiple Related Projects into One Release	p. 280
Organizing Multiple Related Projects Over Time	p. 282
Managing Project Managers	p. 285
Creating a Program Dashboard	p. 287
Completing a Project	p. 289
Managing Requests for Early Release	p. 289
Managing Beta Releases	p. 290
When You Know You Can't Meet the Release Date	p. 291
Shepherding the Project to Completion	p. 299
Canceling a Project	p. 303
Managing the Project Portfolio	p. 307
Build the Portfolio of All Projects	p. 307
Evaluate the Projects	p. 309
Decide Which Projects to Fund Now	p. 310
Rank-Order the Portfolio	p. 310
Start Projects Faster	p. 311
Manage the Demand for New Features with a Product Backlog	p. 313
Troubleshoot Portfolio Management	p. 315
More Detailed Information About Life Cycles	p. 323
Serial Life Cycle: Waterfall or Phase-Gate	p. 323
Iterative Life Cycle: Spiral, Evolutionary Prototyping, Unified Process	p. 327
Incremental Life Cycle: Staged Delivery, Design to Schedule	p. 330
Agile Life Cycles	p. 331
Glossary of Terms	p. 335
Bibliography	p. 337
Index	p. 343
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