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1500 questions
5
votes
6 answers

Project Estimation is off by 50% or More! Who is Responsible for Vague Requirements?

I've just started doing some small contracts for the first time, and I'm working on a project with a person responsible for dealing with the client and analyzing requirements. In this case, there was a slight incompleteness in one of the project…
5
votes
4 answers

How can I tell when I need multiple 'tiers' of management?

Large projects and enterprises always seem to have various levels of management. There's usually a top committee that runs the overall direction and big-picture of the project, and one or more levels that are concerned with details of a specific…
Gordon Gustafson
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5
votes
2 answers

How do you refactor a story?

We've been using Pivotal Tracker on a software library project for well over a year. I'm the (admittedly not great) PM. The team is very good about writing notes on the story cards as things progress, but sometimes we start having whole…
mhucka
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5
votes
2 answers

What are pass/fail criteria for internal PM recruitment

Within our organization, from time to time, we need to promote a person to become a Project Manager / Project Leader / Team Leader. The promotion used to be done based on someone's intuition or opinion, like: This guy is communicative, he'll…
Zbigniew Kawalec
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5
votes
2 answers

What is the preferred PMI framework friendly - Web Application for Project Managers?

Don't go answer the question before reading below Many companies follow a very distinct business specific project management approach. I am sure this is true for mid and big companies across the world. Since most of the information is spread…
Geo
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5
votes
4 answers

How to handle 'ilities' (or non-functional requirements) for a project planning/prioritization/work-allocation?

It seems the world is doing a good job at managing functional requirements for a system - you can link them to benefits, prioritize them and manage their implementation schedule (let's assume an ideal world :) Now consider 'ilities' like…
PhD
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5
votes
2 answers

What is a reasonable strategy for estimating story points for new stories?

The project I'm running is very exploratative in that I don't know very much detail about features in advance. My boss will tell me that he wants feature A and that after feature A is finished, he'll come up with say a dozen refinements, A1 -…
Geoff
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5
votes
3 answers

How to Deal with a Request for Asynchronous Communication?

A colleague of mine asks to be cc'd on my communications to our boss. However, he does not cc me on his communications to our boss. We are on the same level in the org chart. He has seniority and was originally my manager. Our boss has asked me to…
Mark Phillips
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5
votes
4 answers

How should the Product Owner prioritize the backlog?

Should the Product Owner prioritize the backlog side-by-side with the customer? Must this step be done during the Sprint Planning Meeting, or could it be done before the meeting? Is the meeting restricted only to the Product Owner and the Team?
davidepiazza
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5
votes
7 answers

Should the customer developers be part of our scrum team?

If during a sprint some task depends on customer development, should the customer developers considered as part of the team? At the sprint planning meeting should these developer attend to share how much time to be done for that task?
davidepiazza
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5
votes
4 answers

What objective criteria can be used in staffing a project with engineers?

Being a project manager what objective criteria do you use when recruiting new technical engineers to your project? Typically their resumes are full of magic buzz words. How to select the right person, objectively?
yegor256
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5
votes
6 answers

What can I do to encourage teams to lighten up?

I work with a geographically distributed team (different timezones) with people from various cultures and background. Some of us have never met each other in person but we communicate with each other over phone, chat and email almost on an hourly…
Rahul
5
votes
6 answers

VCS + IssueTracking + CI for free?

What is the best way to build an IT infrastructure based on a free / affordable online services (GitHub, BitBucket, etc)? To facilitate collaborative work of a group of independent remote developers (2-5) I need a Version Control system to store…
5
votes
3 answers

How to structure a "work package"?

Could someone give me the information about how one structures the s.c. "work packages"? I have never done this before but that's my task now. I need to describe use-cases, preliminary definitions, example workflows of the application, goals, I/O of…
azerIO
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5
votes
4 answers

When is the latest opportunity to add new team members to improve schedule performance?

A saying is (at least here in Germany): Adding new people to a late project makes it even later. That is true, because the additional work to introduce the newbies to the project destroys productivity of the established team members for some time.…
Mnementh
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