Anapasoft - thoughts on PM

We’ve been developing inKontext as a solution for teams to collaborate for four years now. In the mean time there are several solutions but none of them seems to offer the same record and artifact linking mechanisms that we believe are needed for effective traceability. We’ve puzzled about this a lot and asked ourselves again just how big an advantage is it for a project manager to be able to associate say a tracked risk record from a project risk log to all the action items and meetings where the risk is handled and discussed. Read the rest of this post »

I was invited to a dinner in London recently which was organized by our bank. It brought together many of their more entrepreneurial customers and was in effect an excuse for a good chin-wag with other like minded souls. The after dinner discussion was kicked off by a couple of well known professional investors who offered an intensely gloomy summary of the situation facing western economies. It was the usual story of stagflation, falling dollar/pound/euro and crashing property prices. Everywhere we need business transformation if we are to survive. Read the rest of this post »

“This is turning into one unholy train wreck!” a client of ours bemoaned during our first discussion with him. “We need to ship the first release of the software in twelve weeks from tomorrow and we are still changing the basic software architecture. No-one understands the system level anymore. There are patches on band-aids on workarounds. Every time we fix a bug then something else breaks. I am seriously worried that we won’t make it.” Read the rest of this post »

One of the things that always brings home the reality of  the new product  ”chasm” is how many folks are still using the most basic and cumbersome collaboration methods to manage even sophisticated projects. We are continually asked which of our competitors we meet most frequently in prospect accounts, but the truth is that the majority of projects are still managed by email and excel spreadsheets with a single copy of MS Project in the PMO for resource tracking. At first we thought it was just the laggards but it seems to be prevalent in the early majority…Ooops! Read the rest of this post »

Over the past 7 years we’ve been involved in a lot of programs that have made extensive use of outsourcing services with both onshore and offshore teams. From small website projects to extremely complex mission critical telecoms industry products we have tried just about every combination of tools, infrastructure and service agreements to see what works best - or as one of my colleagues recently remarked ”what works least worst“. While I don’t agree with that sentiment completely, I confess I know exactly what he means. Read the rest of this post »

Rats!… The gutters on my house need replacing. In part it’s because a tree came down recently and caught them a glancing blow which they didn’t appreciate, but quite honestly they were old and leaked anyway. It seems to be a very big project with appropriate prices. I have to admit that I had no idea about sophisticated technology of the gutter industry – all I knew was that a gutter had two states: working (other people’s) and blocked (almost always the case on my house). But now I am learning about how laminar flow, aluminum extrusions and seamless joins eliminate the need for maintenance for ever and ever and ever…. Cool! It seems 21st Century gutters are no longer just gutters; they are “rain water management” systems. Read the rest of this post »

One of the things that seems to plague engineering programs is a band of individuals working to the point of extreme exhaustion and pulling off ever more miraculous feats. But there’s no doubt that extended exposure to this sort of culture is very counter productive to the group. For a young team a successful outcome is good for the ego. It earns kudos, management praise and accolades, and alas usually no money.  The second time around folks wise up. The third time they look for other opportunities. Read the rest of this post »

We’re tired but very pleased. After an INTENSE 3 months of design, coding, testing, fixing, retesting (and did we mention sleep? no? well that’s ok because there wasn’t any), we released the completely redesigned inKontext project management tool suite. You can read all the marketing info about the new earth shattering breakthroughs at our website, but in keeping with the charter of this blog I want to restrict my overflowing enthusiasm and just mention some of the things we learnt about extreme programming in mission critical software. Here goes in commercial-free form: Read the rest of this post »

It has always struck me as odd how modern project management includes risk containment as one of the key knowledge areas, but in reality it is often no more than an initial ceremonial process with very limited scope. What-if scenarios are identified, and mitigations defined at the kick-off meeting where management is given a detailed presentation by the team of all the goals, methodologies, costs, scedules and so on. But rarely does anyone really monitor the risks during the project execution phases. All too often the risk management plan is used as a means to divert blame later on, and has little to do with containment. Read the rest of this post »

Over the past 15 years there’s been a great deal of study about the pros and cons of offshoring software development work, but much of it has centered around large programs where the lower costs more than offset the burden of extra project management which is required.

We wanted to see how effective a solution offshoring could be for a really small program and decided to run a pilot program designing a simple website for company internal use. Read the rest of this post »