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Contracted IT Projects: A Primer for Client Project Managers If you’ve never managed an IT project for your organization that had significant work outsourced to a vendor, what’s learned on the job can be VERY painful and VERY expensive. Here are some things to watch out for.
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Pandemic Challenge 205 of 7,923: Recognizing Project Milestones These days teams are compensating as best they can, but some aspects of project life are difficult with remote teams and social distancing. Celebrating milestone achievement is hard but necessary in our current circumstances. |
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Requirements Discipline: Avoiding “Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts" Absent an effective requirements baseline it is difficult to distinguish clarifications and error correction from enhancements and changes to the original ask. |
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A Tale of Toxic Sponsorship It is difficult to succeed without effective sponsorship—and almost impossible if your sponsor is toxic, as this true tale explains. |
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Schedule Risk Analysis Building schedules for complex projects is challenging. While the results are never perfect, credible schedules are a useful communication and coordination device. Incredible schedules are a dangerous waste of time and energy that damage a project manager’s credibility and cost an enterprise a fortune. |
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What’s the Problem with User Stories? Agile projects focus on very lightweight, simple requirements embodied in user stories. However, there are some problems with relying solely on user stories. They often don't contain enough accuracy for development, testing, or industry regulations. There's a better way to write detailed requirements that are still agile. |
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How to Make a Fixed-Scope Contract More Agile Establishing a contract that genuinely supports agile methods can be a significant challenge. By its very nature, a contract that specifies detailed, upfront deliverables contravenes the principles of flexibility and adaptation that are at the heart of agile. But it is possible—both parties just need to focus on results. |
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3 Questions for Easier, Less Stressful Project Estimates In agile development, the idea of precise estimates is unrealistic. But estimates are needed to inform decision-makers about whether it's worth solving a problem as it is currently understood. It sounds counterintuitive, but instead of asking for one estimate of cost and schedule, ask for three. Here's why it's more useful. |