Manage It!

• Foreword
• Starting a Project
  • Define Projects and Project Managers
  • Manage Your Drivers, Constraints, and Floats
  • Discuss Your Project Constraints with Your Client or Sponsor
  • Decide on a Driver for Your Project
  • Manage Sponsors Who Want to Overconstrain Your Project
  • Write a Project Charter to Share These Decisions
  • Know What Quality Means for Your Project
• Planning the Project
  • Start the Wheels Turning
  • Plan Just Enough to Start
  • Develop a Project Plan Template
  • Define Release Criteria
  • Use Release Criteria
• Using Life Cycles to Design Your Project
  • Understanding Project Life Cycles
  • Overview of Life Cycles
  • Seeing Feedback in the Project
  • Larger Projects Might Have Multiple Combinations of Life Cycles
  • Managing Architectural Risk
  • Paddling Your Way Out of a Waterfall
  • My Favorite Life Cycles
• Scheduling the Project
  • Pragmatic Approaches to Project Scheduling
  • Select from These Scheduling Techniques
  • Start Scheduling with a Low-Tech Tool
• Estimating the Work
  • Pragmatic Approaches to Project Estimation
  • Milestones Define Your Project’s Chunks
  • How Little Can You Do?
  • Estimating with Multitasking
  • Scheduling People to Multitask by Design
  • Using Rolling-Wave Scheduling
  • Deciding on an Iteration Duration
  • Estimating Using Inch-Pebbles Wherever Possible
• Recognizing and Avoiding Schedule Games
  • Bring Me a Rock
  • Hope Is Our Most Important Strategy
  • Queen of Denial
  • Sweep Under the Rug
  • Happy Date
  • Pants on Fire
  • Split Focus
  • Schedule Equals Commitment
  • We’ll Know Where We Are When We Get There
  • The Schedule Tool Is Always Right, or Schedule Dream Time
  • We Gotta Have It; We’re Toast Without It
  • We Can’t Say No
  • Schedule Chicken
  • 90% Done
  • We’ll Go Faster Now
  • Schedule Trance
• Creating a Great Project Team
  • Recruit the People You Need
  • Help the Team Jell
  • Make Your Organization Work for You
  • Know How Large a Team You Need
  • Know When to Add More People
  • Become a Great Project Manager
  • Know When It’s Time to Leave
• Steering the Project
  • Steer the Project with Rhythm
  • Conduct Interim Retrospectives
  • Rank the Requirements
  • Timebox Requirements Work
  • Timebox Iterations to Four or Fewer Weeks
  • Use Rolling-Wave Planning and Scheduling
  • Create a Cross-Functional Project Team
  • Select a Life Cycle Based on Your Project’s Risks
  • Keep Reasonable Work Hours
  • Use Inch-Pebbles
  • Manage Interruptions
  • Manage Defects Starting at the Beginning of the Project
• Maintaining Project Rhythm
  • Adopt or Adapt Continuous Integration for Your Project
  • Create Automated Smoke Tests for the Build
  • Implement by Feature, Not by Architecture
  • Get Multiple Sets of Eyes on Work Products
  • Plan to Refactor
  • Utilize Use Cases, User Stories, Personas, and Scenarios to Define Requirements
  • Separate GUI Design from Requirements
  • Use Low-Fidelity Prototyping as Long as Possible
• Managing Meetings
  • Cancel These Meetings
  • Conduct These Types of Meetings
  • Project Kickoff Meetings
  • Release Planning Meetings
  • Status Meetings
  • Reporting Status to Management
  • Project Team Meetings
  • Iteration Review Meetings
  • Troubleshooting Meetings
  • Manage Conference Calls with Remote Teams
• Creating and Using a Project Dashboard excerpt
  • Measurements Can Be Dangerous
  • Measure Progress Toward Project Completion
  • Develop a Project Dashboard for Sponsors
  • Use a Project Weather Report
• Managing Multisite Projects
  • What Does a Question Cost You?
  • Identify Your Project’s Cultural Differences
  • Build Trust Among the Teams
  • Use Complementary Practices on a Team-by-Team Basis
  • Look for Potential Multisite Project and Multicultural Problems
  • Avoid These Mistakes When Outsourcing
• Integrating Testing into the Project
  • Start People with a Mind-Set Toward Reducing Technical Debt
  • Reduce Risks with Small Tests
  • TDD Is the Easiest Way to Integrate Testing into Your Project
  • Use a Wide Variety of Testing Techniques
  • Define Every Team Member’s Testing Role
  • What’s the Right Developer-to-Tester Ratio?
  • Make the Testing Concurrent with Development
  • Define a Test Strategy for Your Project
  • System Test Strategy Template
  • There’s a Difference Between QA and Test
• Managing Programs
  • When Your Project Is a Program
  • Organizing Multiple Related Projects into One Release
  • Organizing Multiple Related Projects Over Time
  • Managing Project Managers
  • Creating a Program Dashboard
• Managing Requests for Early Release
  • Managing Beta Releases
  • When You Know You Can’t Meet the Release Date
  • Shepherding the Project to Completion
  • Canceling a Project
• Managing the Project Portfolio
  • Build the Portfolio of All Projects
  • Evaluate the Projects
  • Decide Which Projects to Fund Now
  • Rank-Order the Portfolio
  • Start Projects Faster
  • Manage the Demand for New Features with a Product Backlog
  • Troubleshoot Portfolio Management

Project Templates

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