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How Long is a Piece of String?
Posted by Deborah Hartmann on May 19, 2006 02:10 PM
Tom Looy, Thoughtworks PM, blogs on things he'd like to pass on to his son. In this entry he reflects on an absurdity at the root of traditional planning. So, quickly: how long is a piece of string?... It's a pretty silly question, isn't it? But would you believe that questions like that are asked all the time regarding IT projects? And what is even more amazing is that people actually give answers to such vague questions and then they make important business decisions based on them.In a departure from traditional project management practice, Agile rejects "big up-front" phases, like planning and design. Instead, Agile projects proceed empirically, that is to say, by means of experimentation and reflection: planning and executing incrementally and adapting along the way.
From his experience as a Project Manager, Looy wrote that he has learned to stop estimating and start measuring progress on his projects as soon as possible. How soon? Within weeks of the project start date, he said. After outlining a couple of common estimation disfunctions, Looy has listed some strategies for a team that would like to start measuring a project's progress and stop relying on estimates
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How long is a piece of string?
by
Jason Carreira
Posted
May 22, 2006 2:43 PM
Re: How long is a piece of string?
by
Rafael de F. Ferreira
Posted
May 22, 2006 4:55 PM
Re: How long is a piece of string?
by
Rafael de F. Ferreira
Posted
May 22, 2006 4:55 PM
Re: How long is a piece of string?
by
Alex Popescu
Posted
May 23, 2006 2:18 AM
Economize requirements gathering, not planning
by
Jeff Bonevich
Posted
May 22, 2006 11:03 PM
Re: Economize requirements gathering, not planning
by
Deborah Hartmann
Posted
May 27, 2006 10:44 AM
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Why is that hard? You keep going till you get to the end, then that's how long it is ;-)
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Funny enough, I've been in projects that felt very similiar to your algorithm. The only difference is that the ends were tied together...
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Funny enough, I've been in projects that felt very similiar to your algorithm. The only difference is that the ends were tied together...
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I think you must have made a typo in saying to avoid planning...it's big up-front requirements gathering you want to avoid, that and the falacy of estimates. Planning is always required, and is what allows the project to adapt along the way.
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Or you can make more complex, so you can be seen like a cool PM: always devide the string in 2 and show your team the half :-). ./alex -- :Architect of InfoQ.com: .w( the_mindstorm )p.
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You are right! It's a typo. Thanks --deb
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