One concept that is essential to Scrum is “team velocity”. Team velocity is the number of user stories or product backlog items, in number of points, that the team can deliver during a Sprint. Team velocity plays a pertinent role in the calculation of the human resource cost of the project. To demonstrate, let’s assume(…)
Data analysis is the application of tools and techniques to organise, study, conclude, and make predictions about a specific collection of information or data. The point of data analysis is to understand information on some deeper, more meaningful level. Information or data is a mere collection of facts that by themselves tell little or nothing(…)
Conditional formatting is applied to one or more cells and when the data in those cells meet the condition or conditions specified, the chosen formats are applied. Excel has a number of pre-set conditional formatting options that make it really easy to apply commonly used conditions to data as a starting point. Let me demonstrate(…)
“To guarantee success of the project is to have a strong, experienced Project Manager (PM) and a strong, experienced Business Analyst (BA)”. - Barbara Carkenord The roles of the two are closely tied, and what I have seen in many organizations, one individual plays both the roles, which at times work but most of the time(…)
Findings presented at the 2010 Gartner ITxpo indicate that nearly half of all PMOs result in failure. There is a drastic number of businesses feel that their PMOs do not deliver value. Maybe they do not understand what PMOs do and hence they tend to fail at large. The Project Management Office (PMO) is an(…)
Some important fact extract from the survey conducted by VersionOne on state of agile. 1. The top 3 reasons organisations cited for adopting agile are to accelerate time to release, increase productivity, and to more easily manage changing priorities. 2. 64% of organisations feel that agile projects are faster to completion. 3. The inability to(…)
There’s an awful lot of confusion in our industry about CMMI and Agile are. Those of us who work with agile and the CMMI every day understand the difference, but there are thousands of organisations that are adopting Agile or CMMI without really knowing what they are asking for. As a result, they might say,(…)
Change Management is a structured approach to shifting/transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state. I am going to talk rather about a job quit change management. Having recently just quit a job, I have given the topic of job change a great deal of thought. No matter how(…)
To address the challenges faced by software developers, an initial group of 17 methodologists formed the Agile Software Development Alliance (www.agilealliance.com), often referred to simply as the Agile Alliance, in February of 2001. An interesting thing about this group is that they all came from different backgrounds, yet were able to come to an agreement(…)
To address the challenges faced by software developers, an initial group of 17 methodologists formed the Agile Software Development Alliance (www.agilealliance.com), often referred to simply as the Agile Alliance, in February of 2001. An interesting thing about this group is that they all came from different backgrounds, yet were able to come to an agreement(…)