We discussed the following items:

1. Why focus on Estimating?
2. Time Management Essentials
3. Estimating Basics
4. Estimating Reality Checks
5. Best Practices
6. PM SaS software review

The key essentials, or critical success factors for estimating and managing the time on a project came down to a few key points:

• It is critical to have clear requirements up front. Knowledge risk (the risk that you don’t understand the scope of the problem) is the primary reason for estimates to be under the actual effort required
• Active Sponsorship (in a positive way) is essential
• Time needs to be allocated to do planning. Too often teams are just thrown into the problem and expected to start
• It takes discipline to do the planning and estimating properly. It can’t simply be rushed through.
• There are tools to help with planning and scheduling; they help but do not replace experience and effective project managers.
• The best estimators have had lots of experience with estimating. If you don’t, you need to bring people on board who have lived through similar problems before.
• A good project manager provides the leadership to ensure bumps along the way don’t derail the project. They remove roadblocks and run interference so the team can focus on the problem at hand

 The full presentation is below.

Related posts:

1. Common Pitfalls When Moving to Agile
2. Throw out the idea of comparing Actuals to Estimates!

http://www.smashingapps.com/2010/09/22/awesome-yet-free-web-apps-to-make-project-managers-lives-easier.html

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There are four major competencies (or “pillars”) required of projects managers. It is required for project managers to understand the tools, processes, and skills of project management, but that is not a sufficient role in most organizations. Project Managers play many different roles and will be asked to go beyond traditional project management to support the overal business of the organization or the client.

1 – Delivery

This pillar speaks to the traditional aspects of project management. This pillar covers managing scope, issues, and risks, communication and coordination of activities with the team, client and third parties, planning and estimation, status and tracking progress, change management, facilitation, and all the other key practice areas from the PM Body of Knowledge. It is the stuff that needs to be done to deliver the project on time, on budget, and meeting or exceeding the client expectations.

2 – Operations

Project managers often have an operational role in the organization as well. This pillar refers to the tasks needed to “keep the lights on” in the organization. It includes financial reporting (profit and loss, margins, budgeting and actual revenue and expenses). It also includes time tracking and reporting, administration, policy and procedure stewardship, forecasting resource needs, and HR processes.

3 – People

Project Managers also need to focus energy on the people on their team. This means acquiring, developing, and growing the team with people that will be valueable contributors to the project success. It also means managing morale, growth and development plans, feedback and compensation processes, reward and recognition, and discipline issues. This pillar is all about the soft side of project managment and getting a group of individuals motivated and achieving much more as a team than they could on their own.

4 – Business Development

In particular in the service business, but applicable to most situations is the role of the project manager in shaping new opportunities into real projects. This pillar focuses on growing business with current clients (scope additions, new project phases, or new projects). It can also mean consulting with a pursuit team to help develop an approach and an estimate for delivering the work and demonstrating how the client objectives could be achieved.

Typically project managers do not spend equal time on each pillar at any one time. The energy or focus also shifts depending on the situation and the experience of the project manager. More junior project managers will probably focus primarily on delivery and operations, while more senior or director roles will shift their focus to people and business development. The four pillars provide a framework for defining a project manager job description, identifying and qualifiying new project manager candidates, and developing and growing well rounded and successful project managers in your organization.

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Related posts:

1. Three Key Factors in the Project Closeout Phase
2. The new role of a Project Manager on Agile Teams
3. Skills and Team Selection

It should be a great conference. More details can be found at the Agile 2010  Conference Site.

Related posts:

1. Presenting at ProjectWorld & BusinessAnalystWorld 2010

Go to Event Details.

Here is the presentation from the event.

Related posts:

1. Presenting at ProjectWorld & BusinessAnalystWorld 2010
2. Common Pitfalls When Moving to Agile
3. Four Pillars of Project Management

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1. A clearly defined and shared vision or purpose
2. Well defined and understood roles and responsibilities
3. Trust and support within the team
4. Effective communication and conflict resolution
5. Interdependence
6. Empowered and Accountable for issue and resolutions
7. Enjoyment and satisfaction from working together

These characteristics form a set of competencies that are the basis of high performing teams. Teams with a balanced set of these competencies will be rated as higher performing teams or may have a high likelihood of being successful.

Related posts:

1. Motivation and Reward Models on Agile Teams
2. Supporting Teams through the 4 Stages
3. Hiring for your Agile Team

There are new or redefined roles in agile teams. These often parallel similar titles in traditional development teams, but there are new roles and important differences in the responsibilities that are important to understand:

• Project Manager – Scrum Master, manages issues and removes roadblocks
• Architect – Responsible for overall system architecture and development quality and processes
• Developer – Participates in design, creates unit tests, builds and delivers code
• Tester – Dedicated testers assigned to each track of development
• Test Lead – Responsible for organizing and planning testing efforts and mentors testers
• Client Proxy – Helps remote teams clarify requirements and resolve issues in real time
• Product Owner – Client owner who participates in Kick-offs and Iteration closures, as well as provides feedback

British Telecom described an approach where one part of the team selection process is having people apply for the open positions, so that affinity or alignment with the goals and objectives of the team are promoted. There are problems however for the project manager by having people self select for teams. Most of the time project managers cannot choose the team members and have to make the best of what they have got. Politics set in the company or the realities of current staffing or resource shortages can determine which team members get assigned to the project team.

Structurally diverse teams (from different functional units, business units, reporting levels in the organization, and demographics) are better equipped to take advantage of knowledge shared with outsiders. However, structural diversity can increase the complexity of communication and work coordination. The implications are that organizations need to design work groups to include members with strong external networks, look for ways to improve connectivity among employees, and foster a culture that supports knowledge sharing.

Understanding the roles, skills, and functional areas required on a typical agile team and the process for selection and staffing teams are important to the overall performance of the team.

Related posts:

1. Hiring for your Agile Team
2. Lessons from an inexperienced Agile Team
3. Collaboration and Diversity

Content Management

Of course the key to it all is WordPress - www.wordpress.org
Vastly superior to my old platform (Blogger) in my opinion. A breeze to maintain and enhance.

Hosting and Domain

GoDaddy - www.godaddy.com
Good prices, reasonable service, full featured

Plugins

Plugins are where you can really bring your site to life.  These add all the bling and improve the interaction and functionality your site provides. Here are the ones I have implemented, after much research of what was being used by other bloggers and selecting the best.

All-in-one SEO Pack – Michael Torbert – http://semperfiwebdesign.com/
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog

Backupify for WordPress - Backupify – http://www.backupify.com/
Backup of WordPress database to your Backupify account.

cforms - Oliver Seidel – http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
Used for the contact form.

del.icio.us for WordPress – Ricardo Gonzalez – http://rick.jinlabs.com/code/delicious
Provides the widget to display the recent delicious links on the sidebar

FD Feedburner Plugin - John Watson – http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedburner/
Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed

Flare Smith - Eric Marden – http://xentek.net/code/wordpress/plugins/flaresmith/
Plugin to insert FeedBurner’s javascript to support FeedBurner Stats and FeedFlare units on your WordPress site.

FollowMe - WPBurn.com – http://wpburn.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-followme-plugin
WP FollowMe is a wordpress plugin that allow you to add a twitter Follow me badge on your wordpress blog.

GD LinkedIn Badge - Milan Petrovic – http://www.dev4press.com/plugins/gd-linkedin-badge/
This widget displays badge with a link to a LinkedIn profile page.

GD Star Rating - Milan Petrovic – http://www.gdstarrating.com/
GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up advanced rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog using single, multi and thumbs ratings.

Google Analyticator – Ronald Heft – http://ronaldheft.com/code/analyticator/
Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google’s Analytics.

Google XML Sitemaps - Arne Brachhold – http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.

IntenseDebate – IntenseDebate – http://intensedebate.com/wordpress
Full comment and account data sync between IntenseDebate and WordPress ensures that you will always have your comments.

ShareThis – http://sharethis.com/
Let your visitors share a post/page with others. Supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Twitter Tools - Crowd Favorite – http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
Integrates Twitter and the blog. Tweet when you blog. Blog a summary of your tweets. Shortens with Bitly automatically.

WP Security Scan - Michael Torbert – http://semperfiwebdesign.com/plugins/wp-security-scan/
Perform security scan of WordPress installation.

WP Super Cache - Donncha Caoimh – http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/
Enables caching of the blog to improve performance.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin - mitcho – http://mitcho.com/code/yarpp/
Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

Theme - “StudioPress”
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wordpress-themes/

Thanks to all those people who have contributed to the open source community and these packages. There is some great work being done, and your help is greatly appreciated!

I would love to hear what others have used on their blogs that have really worked well for them.

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. New look for the Blog
2. Welcome

One of the key principles of Agile is to “Amplify Learning”. Development is an exercise in discovery. Individuals will try various approaches to solving the problem, and mistakes will be made. This is when learning occurs, and the team can take from the experience and improve on the solution as a whole. This requires trust between team members, and between the team and the external stakeholders. The best approach to improving a software development environment is to amplify learning.

Project Managers should assist the team in developing a set of ground rules. These are not meant to reduce conflict and contention, but direct them in positive ways. As described by, these rules can include such rules as:

• Everyone has an equal voice
• Everyone’s contribution is valuable
• Attack issues, not people
• Keep privacy within the team
• Respect each other and your differences
• Everyone participates

These rules should be decided on by the team, and posted prominently in the team shared environment.

What other Ground Rules have worked, and what else have you done to support trust on your teams?

Related posts:

1. Seven characteristics of High Performing Teams
2. Supporting Teams through the 4 Stages
3. Motivation and Reward Models on Agile Teams