This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Agile Estimating and Planning (More Critical Chain from Outside the TOC Community) -- If you're planning to attend SD West 2004 (Software Development Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, March 15-19), you might want to check out a presentation by Mike Cohn. According to the session description:
Planning is important even for projects using agile processes such as XP, Scrum, or Feature-Driven Development. Unfortunately, we've all seen so many worthless plans that we'd like to throw them away altogether. The good news is that it is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months that can be accurate and useful.
In this class we will look at why traditional plans fail but why planning is still necessary even on agile projects. We will look at various approaches to estimating including unit-less points and ideal time. The class will describe four techniques for deriving estimates as well as when and how to re-estimate. We will look at how to use Critical Chain techniques to create a plan that dramatically improves the project's chances of on-time completion. Also discussed will be using velocity to track progress against the plan.
This class will be equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project.
I wish I could be there. Between this presentation and the recent new edition of Death March, Critical Chain-based project management is getting a lot of attention from new sources.
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