project management

I must admit—I had to resist the urge to put my head through the monitor this morning when I pulled up ESPN.com and saw this. Seriously, do we really need to be monitoring the seconds until a man who puts a ball in a hole for a living decides on his next team?

There's a project management revolution going on today, and it goes by the name of Agile.

Agile project management methodologies are an alternative to traditional waterfall project management, which is the style of project management used in the majority of web development and design projects today.

Large companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.com have already made the switch to Agile.

Why?

In this week's TenSpot podcast, we get down to the nitty gritty. Kayla Wren discusses running the Scrum process with a blended product backlog, and Dustin Currie discusses some of the problems with project estimation, and some strategies for creating better estimates on your next project.

Power Tip

It has almost been a year since LevelTen decided to go agile and implement the Scrum process to tackle development and marketing related projects. Throughout the learning process we have made some slight alterations tailored to fit LevelTen’s needs. Most recently, we have introduced an “Internal Scrum” to keep track of the never ending tasks that need to be taken care of around the office – fixing IT equipment, documenting processes, documenting software, office organization, decorating, etc.

I have been working on a new whitepaper about how to become an online leader. One of the cornerstones is to use a strategic, agile process. While agile is not for every project, often it is by far the optimal process for web development. While many large development organization such as Microsoft, IBM, Google and Yahoo! use agile, very few companies that don’t do software development for a living are using it – particularly small and midsized businesses.

In our very first episode of Webintensive, we pull out all the stops!

Webintensive is our new monthly podcast where we have an in-depth discussion about an important industry topic. These discussions will frequently feature a variety of guest interviews with topic experts.

For almost a year now LevelTen has been making a slow transition from the traditional waterfall development methodology to an agile one. Our team had read about the benefits of Scrum – visibility of progress, increase in team morale, more accurate estimating of required effort, lightweight specs and requirements documentation. We were all on board to try it, so what took us so long?

I was doing some research on the adoption rate of agile development methodologies in corporations and came across this great quote in a CIO magazine article:

The Standish Group International is an IT research and consulting company located in West Yarmouth, Mass. The company was founded in 1985 by Jim Johnson. They are most famous for their research on why IT projects fail and their often quoted CHAOS Report. The Standish Group offers several studies and newsletters for purchase and consulting services to help companies improve their project management.

Standish Group website

The CHAOS Report is a study based on The Standish Group’s CHAOS Research Project on IT project success rates and project management best practices. The study is often cited as the de facto authority on success rates of IT projects. It was started in 1994 and reported that only a startling low 16.2% of IT projects are successful. Successful projects are defined as meeting all the requirements of the project management iron triangle; on time, on budget and on scope. The CHAOS reports classifies projects into: