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? …

Everyone is a project manager right? If you are reading this I will take the assumption that you have an interest in project management, that being true I will take the following distinction that you have a conscious or subconscious ability to identify, interpret and understand the real meaning behind the words people say. All ‘good’ managers of people have fundamental rapport building, intuition and body language understanding to aid any understanding of the current situations, opinions and possible options. Even if you have not studied these specifically in the past …

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 …

“One of the most difficult aspect to project management for some individuals is the act of estimating work. Some people are born with it, some acquire the skills and confidence and others never really get it. You have to know your limitations.
Below is another section from Gary Heerkens’ brief case book entitled “Project Management.” This section provides a basic guide to estimating work on a project and covers some common issues with estimating project tasks.
An Introduction to Estimating
Estimating is a big part of project planning. To prepare an accurate, thorough …

This is a nice, simple explanation of the basics of Agile project management a software engineering environment written by Adam Feldman. For the original article please visit his Project management blog
Stories. Acceptance Criteria. Value based prioritisation. Iterate often. Change is normal – be agile.
Stories
Agile encourages the use of User Stories as a requirements gathering technique.  Stories are similar to high level requirements, however, they are normally written from the perspective of the actual user.
It is helpful for each story to express the value of the story to the customer.  For example, …

I have read a few posts and articles about change management in projects and this one written by Martin Burns @ IBM is really quite good. Managing digital projects is always more demanding in mine any many other PM’s opinions. The goalposts shift at such a rate and the web is the most invasive and

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