Project Hero Blog - Weekly Best Practices and Tips

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...

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...

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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Julia couldn't be more frustrated! There were less than three months to finish the project, and yet everything was going wrong. And to top it all, the budget to complete the work was nearly exhausted.

Julia's problem boils down to ineffective project management. She may have failed to complete the steps necessary to prepare for project success.  She may have also failed to create a proper plan fo...

For over 10 years, stakeholders tried to make the Denver International Airport Automated Baggage Handling project work before giving up. The cost of continuing was around $120M, on top of an already over-budget project that was too complex to fix. Project leaders should know when to give up and cancel a project. Here are 5 circumstances that signal the necessity of cancellation:

1. Project objecti
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Decades of Project Management research shows that lack of user involvement/ executive sponsorship and requirements management are consistently high on the top 10 causes of project failure list. Over time, there has been a modest uptick in project success rates, but still, large percentages of projects fail to meet their goals. Why? Here is a short candidate list to consider:

• Not enough of the r
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Getting the right requirements are important for project success. Whether you are in a dual role or collaborating with a business analyst, project managers should make sure all their projects include, at a minimum, these three basic types of requirements:

1. Business requirements usually represent the rationale - high-level goals and objectives - for undertaking a project. These should include the
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