Adobe live: Memo to ceo
Wed, May 30, 2007
Just returned from Adobe Live. Was great to meet up with some (former) students I haven’t seen for a while.
Always great to see sessions by Aral Balkan. Today he presented two sessions. The most important for me was “the letter to ceo” session(older comments about this session, Sheets of older session). He addressed the problem of project failure and the need to use more agile methods. And offcourse to give the user a fair chance to have input in the product. I forgot how serious this problem is, now I am no longer an active programmer but an educator. One short look at the projects I have done shows that a lot of my projects have failed. No right fit with the user, bloated expectations etc.
Now I am an educator I have the chance to show other ways of doing projects. For some years now I have tried to get us (our educational department) out of the waterfall. But it’s no easy job. For some reason a lot of students, colleagues and clients have a hardwired “waterfall model” and always seem to fall back into 100 page requirement documents.
We are working on this in our minor, but I think we can do more to make a change in the complete department.
Maybe we should invite Aral to change some attitudes.
(will probably post more on Adobe live later)
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Tags: Conference
June 26th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Greetings,
My two cents worth if I may. I am an IT Project Manager, PMP. I have another PMP friend that has just suffered a project shake up because of Agile. Why? Its my understanding that in Agile the programmer becomes the designer, archetect, code writer, Q.A analyst, plummer, mechanic, cook, etc. The problem is that most programmers I have ever worked with don’t really understand business. Writing code and following specs yes, business, no. The problem with failed projects is usually not the approach like Agile or waterfall, its lack of project discipline. What a PMP brings to the table is understanding of execution. You still need planning and lots of it. You need effort analysis, accurate delegation of resources, excellent quality control and above all risk management! Waterfall is just a scheduling term its not a project methodology. Learn good project discipline and then apply Agile, waterfall, critical chain (which works), gated projects or whatever. That’s what CEO’s and programmers need to grasp.