Project Hero Blog - Weekly Best Practices and Tips

While agile methods may not fit every project, every project that uses agile automatically gets a boost in customer experience, satisfaction, and engagement.  This is a substantial benefit that most businesses crave!  Check out these  5 ways that agile, if done correctly, can improve customer relationships and propel your business forward.

1. Customer involvement is elevated and...

Let's face it.  Estimation is a necessary evil for all projects.  Having good estimates helps to mitigate time and cost risks and better enables us to deliver successful projects.  While the agile environment may have more flexibility, most organizations cannot tolerate never-ending projects.

As a whole and at a high level, estimation of agile projects is not that different from...

2020 has certainly been a year to be remembered, and perhaps maybe forgotten.  It has created new working habits and patterns that are likely to stay with us for years to come.  Some with online business models remain largely unaffected.  Others have had to scramble and get quickly accustomed to work-at-home routines, shifting work times and priorities, and work with virtual...

I'm dreaming of an agile New Year
Just like the teams I used to know.
Where the backlogs glisten
And product owners listen
To hear improvement in the retro, oh, the retro.

I said I'm dreaming of an agile New Year
With every user story I write.
May your stand-ups be merry and hustle
And may all your New Years' be agile.

Our user story for you?  As a global citizen celebrating any winter...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

"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 the...

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...