Another great article Posted by Brad Egeland
During the course of our projects, we often run into situations where our customer needs some massaging.  Issues come up, problems arise that are the fault of the delivery team, budget overruns happen, and schedules slip.  Rarely does a project team make it through an entire engagement without the customer being upset – often justifiably so – about something.

While I was at university studying Software engineering management I was lucky to have Dr Ian K Bray provide a unit of Requirements Engineering. Why is that such a big thing for me? I’ll tell you, Dr Ian K Bray is the author of one of the most popular published books on Requirements Engineering (An Introduction to Requirements Engineering)
The biggest eye opener in all of this to me was the fact that using use-cases and diagrams to explain the functionality and intent of a software system would drastically reduce …

People : should they be made of gold?
The management of staff in a software engineering environment is crucial. If you do not know already that at the core of any business is the staff, then let me reiterate, at the core of ANY business is its staff. You may argue that it is the quality of the product that is being used? The “Sloppy Joes” burger van enterprise has been a roaring success for the last few years because of the quality of burger? Ok, So who buys the burgers? …

Project success can sometimes be subjective and can be taken from factors that are not in-line with ‘usual’ definitions of project success (time/money etc) This post is not about defining success but more to discuss the core needs of a PM, a PM no less, that drives project success. The feedback of which is interesting to say the least.
I was part of an on-line discussion around this subject and i have posted below some of what I think are the key Behaviours for a successful PM and some opinions of …

Another great post Published by Brad Egeland | June 2, 2009

“You know how it goes….you can follow every PMI standard, practice and guideline. You can produce status reports and project plans that should be placed on some sort of ‘wall of fame’ somewhere. But no matter what you do, the project is doomed to fail – or at least not truly succeed. This can be, of course, for any one of a number of reasons. Some common ones are:

I recently recieved a great e-mail from Brian Cronin at Adaptive Path with some brief yet accurate tips on becoming a great project manager as follows:
What is a manager? What are they really supposed to do? My dictionary provides the following definition:
manager (noun)
a person responsible for controlling or administering all or part of a company or similar organization.
This is the classic understanding most people have of what a project manager is and does, yet I find that it is possible not only to ‘control’ a project, but also to