Project Hero Blog - Weekly Best Practices and Tips

As an agile project manager, you may need to conduct requirements elicitation or work with a BA team that performs elicitation.  Either way, you will need some familiarity with the common forms of agile requirements.  As with all projects, requirements are an important element for success. 

Having the right requirements and having them understood by those doing the project work is critical.  In t...

Holding the project team and others accountable for completing their work is an important skill for a project manager.  It is especially important for agile and other less traditional project management methods where the team is largely self-organizing and self-managing.

To help the agile and other project managers remember how to best hold people accountable, I like to think of the 4Cs: clarity,...

With a growing number of organizations shifting to agile methods for projects, those in the traditional project management role may want to consider how to transition from predictive to agile projects.  In the future, the best project managers will operate more flexibly and manage projects with either waterfall or agile methods as needed. 

While many project management fundamentals stay the same,...

Effective sprint planning is essential for the success of any agile project.  The agile project manager should ensure every iteration delivers the highest possible value to customers to stay true to agile values.  Without effective planning, the team will not start the sprint with a shared understanding of the work.  As a result, the team may defer user stories' implementation and waste time witho...

"We've got three R's we're going to talk about today
We've got to learn to
Reduce, reuse, recycle"

- Jack Johnson

While often thought of as a "lean" process, agile projects can be full of waste. This waste can lead to increased project time and cost, lower productivity, and a failure to deliver the value customers may be expecting.

The agile project manager must learn to manage and control th...

By nature, agile requirements are considered "lighter." With requirements often taking the form of user stories recorded in a product backlog, some requirements may become obsolete as the project progresses.

To avoid the waste of implementing unnecessary or lower priority requirements, prioritization by the business owner is critical.  One aid that helps the business owner think things through an...

Most agile projects rely on iterations; typically three week periods sometimes referred to as sprints.  Each sprint incorporates four agile events, formerly referred to as ceremonies, that help keep the project on track.  One event is scheduled daily, and the remainder is at the end of each sprint.  These events are:

• Daily stand-up meeting: Every day, the full team (facilitator, product owner,
...

All projects generate vast amounts of data beyond regular items, such as retrospectives and lessons learned.  As the project progresses, the project manager needs to collect, index, and perhaps even diarize it for current and future use.

Project data and documents contain information such as:

• Changes to the product backlog for agile projects, change requests for predictive
• Performance of the
...

An important concept for agile projects is the “definition of done.” The team must discuss and understand this concept in terms of the specific project at hand before the first iteration.  Without this understanding, the ability to deliver value will be both difficult and chaotic. 

There are two overarching concepts which are ingredients in the definition:

• Requirements: Are all business, funct
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As an agile project manager, you will need to change your mindset to succeed.  Your role and your team and stakeholders' roles will be different from what they would be in predictive (waterfall) projects.  How you manage will need to be different too.

Here are 6 tips to help you adjust:

1. Agile teams are largely self-organizing, so you will no longer drive the work and monitor the hand-offs in t
...