The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
To write something less stuffy, I recently spent an inordinate amount of time testing project management tools.
From a distance they all look the same – Gantt charts.
Up close the differences are striking. Every tool has one special feature they concentrate on, but most manage to ignore the basic usability aspects.
Some special features are really awesome – LiquidPlanner.com has implemented time ranges (PERT fans check it out – it is the next generation).
Some were web based for east concurrent access for multiple people. Their AJAX web interfaces were almost fast enough to be usable, but just slow enough to keep me frustrated.
Some had unbelievably clever capacity forecasting – one tool calculated productivity rates of people at different points of their learning curves!
But all I wanted was a fast little tool that had resource leveling and snapshots. Resource leveling spreads out multiple projects over multiple people so noone has to work overtime. Snapshots allow me to overlap an old gantt chart over the actual one to see how much it slipped.
I read about 150 tools, I visited about fifty vendors and test driven about 15 tools.
Long story short: OmniPlan won. This $150 app that only runs on Mac beat the pants off everybody else when my needs were concerned.
OnmiPlan is not multiuser. It is not agile-focused. It does not do critical chain or PERT. But I can enter and shuffle tasks several times faster and easier than an other tool let me, and I can simulate different scenarios WHILE I am discussing them.
Imagine your boss asking if you can deliver three month earlier if you get more people. With OmniPlan I can show them the difference that adding people makes instead of trying to convince them with vague statements.
Pictures are worth a thousand words, and with OmniPlan I can produce an authoritative project plan comparison in a minute. No wonder I feel so strongly about it.
Agile methodologies do not eliminate conventional project management methodologies, but complement and change them.
Long term planning, dependency tracking, Gantt visualizations are perfectly rounded out with velocity tracking and frequent revisioning.
Your development team can concentrate on the immediate issues and still keep your project manager updated.
Your project manager has hard data early in the project to know how much will be done by the end of it.
The base elements stay the same, work breakdown and time estimates still happen, but deathmarches and looming deadlines are smaller and less frequent.
I am typing this on a T-Mobile G1.
Hackers will love this phone. It is powerful, featureful, and very easy to develop for. It took me 5 minutes to write my first demo app and have it running on the phone while the debugging info was streaming into Eclipse.
The Android will be very successful. No wonder T-Mobile keeps running out of units.
But why do I wish I had an iphone instead?
Both phones have the same features, and the G1 has a bigger keyboard. But the iphone interface is sleeker, there are many more applications available and the kinks have been already worked out. Apple has two years headstart over Google and it shows.
The Android will catch up to the iPhone in 6-12 months.
Until then I will keep lusting for an iPhone.
Thinking about implementing Agile? Extreme Programming? Scrum?
Google reports 2 million hits for Agile Failure.
Why does the same process fail at one company and succeed at another? And more importantly, how can you ensure your own success?
Most failure reports blame: lack of buy-in, lack of communication, lack of scope, lack of experience, lack of skills. None of these reports help you decide if you have a chance with Agile at your organization.
If you analyze the underlying principles of Agile – team decisions, constant communication, feedback and change – you will realize that it’s a very practical implementation of collaborative management principles. We’re talking Communication, Collaboration, Empowerment, Trust and Reflection.
If you already have a collaborative culture in place, implementing Agile will be a breeze, indeed you might already be an Agile organization without calling it Agile!
OK, you already communicate, collaborate and empower, but how can you check if your organization is also ready? How can you check that all the people under you also believe that they can freely communicate, collaborate and make decisions? How can you check that Collaboration is not just a buzzword in your organization, but reality on every level?
Try answering these questions:
If you answered yes to all five questions, you are good to go! Implementing Agile will be easy and painless and beneficial for you and for your team.
Think about the questions you answered with ‘no’. If you think your organization is working so well that these questions are irrelevant, then you shouldn’t even care about Agile – you are doing well already.
Questions 1 (employee pushback), 3 (employees reporting their own failure), and 5 (employees reporting their own uncertainties) reflect the underlying trust of your employees. Are they willing to voice their doubts in you? Are they willing to expose their own mistakes and weaknesses? Do they have a safe venue to do this? Do they see examples?
Questions 2 (accepting pushback) and 4 (accepting setback) reflect your trust in your employees. Your trust is built on the knowledge gained through communication, so you have to get your people to trust you to openly communicate.
To sum it up: