Project Management Stack Exchange
Project Management Stack Exchange

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1500 questions
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9 answers

Adding new team members to a late project

According to Brooks' Law, adding more people to a late project will make the project later (or by analogy, nine women cannot have a baby in one month). The increased lateness is due to the fact that productive team members must now invest time in…
Sean Earp
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Project Management for Kids

What would be the essential elements of project management you would teach to kids? And how would you teach them? Would there be a difference in teaching approach for 10-12 year olds vs 12-16 year olds? For instance, would the topic of risk…
Stephan
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How to deliver bad news to a project sponsor?

Report Performance (especially if it is behind plans) is a responsibility of a project manager (according to PMBOK). Very often adequate and accurate reporting of insufficient performance will provoke a negative reaction of a project sponsor.…
yegor256
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6 answers

How to run our first post mortem?

I'd like to do a post mortem ("lessons learned") analysis of a recent feature development. It would be the first formal post mortem we do. It was a comparedly small project (roughly 3 weeks), but surfaced enough problems worth analyzing. A bit of…
peterchen
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5 answers

How to make Scrum of Scrums meetings more productive?

At my job, we're having a Scrum of Scrums meeting where all the Scrum Masters get together. This meeting is turning into a boring meeting where everyone gives their status update. I'm trying to make the Scrum of Scrums meeting more proactive, where…
Tony
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6 answers

Which is better: large feature branches or merging frequently? Which is better small work items vs large work items?

My team has problems pushing work items through all the stages in the Kanban board to done. The work items hit code review and pile up and stay there for a long time. The following stage (the QA stage) is starved of work until suddenly everything is…
ben ford
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8 answers

What is the best way to manage a person who shows very little interest in work?

I am supposed to manage a person who tries to give many excuses to avoid work. I talked to her several times that she needs to change her behavior and tried to give her a task to improve her understanding and make her capable of taking some tasks…
Siva
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11 answers

How can I map stakeholders without offending anyone?

I want to map the stakeholders on a project to help form a communication plan. The typical power vs. interest matrix (below) is very helpful, but I fear I can't store it in a document others may read. I suspect people would be offended to see…
Duncan Jones
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7 answers

Is Certified Scrum Master valuable?

What is the value in Certified Scrum Master certifications? I'll be quite honest in saying that I've never put a lot of thought into such certifications, but it seems like if you are interested in Agile and wanting to deepen your understanding,…
Aaron Corcoran
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Difference between grooming and refinement

What is the difference between the terms "grooming" and "refinement" of the product backlog in scrum methodology? I am not able to find an accurate answer to this question. Are they the same?
Alex Blasco
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7 answers

Is there any data to show planning poker produces better estimates than individuals?

As described here planning poker is a group estimating process. It seems that it would work.But is there any data to show that it is better than individual estimation? Edit 4/19/11: I am interested accuracy in terms of time-planning. I am interested…
Brian Carlton
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16 answers

What are the signs that a project is going wrong?

The obvious answer is 'missing key milestones', but that depends on a structured project plan with clear milestones (e.g. waterfall model). What are some of the not-so-obvious or subtle signs that the project is going awry? What's the best-case or…
JBRWilkinson
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4 answers

Would gamification increase employee engagement with time tracking?

A typical difficulty in implementing time tracking in companies is that employees are rarely engaged with time tracking tasks, seeing them as a waste of time. I'm wondering if a gamification approach to time tracking would help, or if it's possible…
d.grassi84
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15 answers

What is better: a physical Scrum board or an online board?

I used to practice Scrum with a physical board. We often faced problems when working with distributed teams or just when going into a meeting room. So I decided to implement a SaaS service to provide an online board, but after speaking with Agile…
Olivier Hory
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3 answers

Sprint Backlog vs Product Backlog

I was always under impression that Sprint Backlog is part of Product Backlog -> it's impossible to add anything into Sprint Backlog without affecting Product Backlog However, according to one of the comments to this post, these backlogs "are…
Steve V
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