Implementing project management

In my last blog I mentioned that I recently received a job offer at a new company.  This started me thinking about what is my plan for getting started at the new job, so today I figured I’d share my thoughts and maybe it will help you or maybe you’ll have some feedback for me.

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Good Requirement Management is perhaps the most important factor in many projects’ successes or failures.  Some research had mentioned that it can be as high as 65%.   Requirement specification greatly affects the scope of the project, which in turn affects the resource and time required.  In this blog, I will share my thoughts and [...]

It sort of pains me to even have to write about #4 on my list of mandatory practices (see Tuesday’s blog):
“4. Testing of every requirement (using the RM tool to track progress)”
because I always think “how else would you test?”. But perhaps that’s because I’m originally from an aerospace background where we [...]

That requirements will change is a given. How you plan for and manage that change is crucial. Think about what you want to accomplish with your change management, what you want to protect yourself from, what you want to avoid, and then put in place the practice that makes sense for you.
Having a [...]

There is a set of SW practices that I consider non-negotiable, and they begin with 2 that are requirements-related:
1. Written, reviewed, approved requirements
2. A requirements baseline, implemented with a requirements management (RM) tool
In my last company, getting these done in a way that was accepted by engineers and management alike did require a pinch of “writing the [...]

At my last company we took pride in the amount of work we were able to accomplish with a very small team – software of high quality and releases on tight schedules. The high quality and the responsiveness to customers’ demand for new features kept our customer support expenses low and gave us good [...]

I was listening to an NPR talk show segment about customer service last week.  It was mainly about being on hold, the friendliness (or unfriendliness) of the support givers, etc.  There was a quote from a customer service person who said that they were rude because the customer service expense “sucked out whatever profit they [...]

Dr. Martin Luther King used to end speechs by quoting a prayer from an old slave preacher.  It’s an apt description of approaches to projects today: “Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”
On [...]

Oh yeah, more anecdotal data tells me silicon valley wants SO MUCH MORE for so much less!

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How do you fix a woefully underfunded government organization and implement over 50 significant citizen serving systems in less than 4 years?  What core values helped Honolulu rise to be ranked 8th in the United States in 2007 by the Center for Digital Government for the deployment of Technology?   How do [...]

The global business landscape is littered with expensive, well-intended strategies that don’t deliver value, often because leaders failed to identify and invest in the full range of projects required to support those strategies.  Co-author of Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan demonstrates what organizational alignment for strategic execution really means and how to engage [...]

 
OK here is the scenario – Do you pass the “ink blot test”??.
It is Friday afternoon on the day before a holiday weekend. You are on the telephone to a venture capital company in New York wanting to know about RoHS impact. The project you are working on since October and which has had three [...]