This year
Pro .NET Best Practices Book Review
by tadanderson
2011
Project Manager Templates
by cms168
2010
Mavenlink: Tour our capabilities to see the benefits
by oseres
ongoing · Doing It Wrong
A fixed priced project, with big design up front, full specification/conception/development/test phases with IBM or Accenture is what everyone does. If it fails nobody will blame you. But if your short/agile/TDD/web like project fails it will be your fault.
2009
Product design debt versus Technical debt | Andrew Chen (@andrew_chen)
The second kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred intentionally. This commonly occurs when an organization makes a conscious decision to optimize for the present rather than for the future. “If we don’t get this release done on time, there won’t be a next release” is a common refrain—and often a compelling one.
Roundup Features
Roundup is a simple-to-use and -install issue-tracking system with web, e-mail and command-line interfaces. It is based on the winning design from Ka-Ping Yee in the Software Carpentry "Track" design competition.
Falkayn's Nest: Agile software, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, eLearning, technology, politics and marketing stuff
there are in general two sorts of projects:
1. Strategic: Key to business success, and as such important.
2. Infrastructure: Necessary to do, but not seen as particularly vital for business success.
gerrit - Project Hosting on Google Code
Web based code review and project management for Git based projects.
Thymer - Super easy Planning, Task and Project Management
by simon_bricolo & 1 other
Discuss: Getting to No
15 Questionnaire
It would be very interesting if you could share a mockup, template of your questionnaire. Or if specific to each projects you are creating, at least, the type of questions in the questionnaire.
On the side of the No No for projects, setting a deadline for delivery of the projects or even a step without having all the materials which guarantee the delivery date.
We have to be very careful when committing to dates, to also set the right expectations of the client. Too often, in a project, it is possible to say, let’s release this section at this date YYYY-MM-DD, the materials will be given to you in the next two weeks. Red flag. It is often better to say, once given this list of items (deliveryDate), we will be releasing this section at “deliveryDate 10 business days”.
In middle size agencies, there is also an issue of resources management. There is more than one project in parallel. Explaining to the client that if he/she misses a particular window, the project will be delayed.
Keep written records of every discussions you had, put down the RESOLUTION and the ACTION. After each meeting, send your meeting minutes to the project participants and the client. It is often better to have a scribe. If you get phone calls from the clients (which is fine), send a summary of the discussion just after.
If you are using a project management system (be mail, sharepoint, basecamp, etc. anything), if the client says “It is not the way I work”, rise a red flag again.
Be careful also of the “just this time” or “just for once” on a exceptional work issue, because if you authorize it once, the client will keep the foot in the door, to reuse it again.
posted at 10:38 am on October 21, 2009 by karlcow
