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Home > Blogs > Featured Blogs > Plan and Deliver

Plan and Deliver

by Peter Schuh

Peter Schuh

peterschuhbookA traditional-sounding name for a blog about agile processes, but let's face it - that's the stuff our customers grade us on.

Do we work with them to identify, assess, and plan functionality in a practical and predictable manner? And do we communicate on the details, report fictionless status, and deliver the goods when we said we would? This blog is about using agile practices and techniques to plan and deliver in real world environnents.




Development Spikes, Technical Unknowns and Fuzzy Estimates

Written by Peter Schuh   
Wednesday, 25 May 2011 22:55
Estimates are a fact of life for most of us. And often – while not always – they are a necessity. If I weren’t using some form of estimation on my current projects, they would be twisted up like Sherman bow ties. And on fire. This brings us to an apparent paradox. The larger and [...]

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A Project Manager’s Acid Test: Fund Your Own Product

Written by Peter Schuh   
Monday, 28 February 2011 01:38
Do you think you are a rockstar project manager? Can you roll out an agile process and leap the tangle of legacy waterfall hurdles without breaking a sweat? Can you walk unaided from a fight club thronged with hackers, cowboy coders, support junkies and alpha heroes? Want to prove it? I’ve got the acid test [...]

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Have You Accounted for February Sick Days?

Written by Peter Schuh   
Tuesday, 08 February 2011 01:54
Superflu weekend struck our family — and all the families in our daughters’ playgroup. Based on preliminary reports (and my own condition) this could stretch into superflu fortnight. This reminds me to ask the question: Has anyone planned for sick days in February? I spotted a trend a few years back that I blogged about in [...]

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Doing Big Deployments That Don’t Suck

Written by Peter Schuh   
Monday, 31 January 2011 01:20
I’ve been doing more than my fair share of deployments lately. These deployments aren’t the one-click-then-beer variety you find on Heroku or in some seriously agile shops. These deployments are arduous day-long journeys, caravanning eight unique technologies, traversing multiple connected systems both up- and down-stream. And bad things do live in the water. Seriously, it [...]

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Make Something Awesome

Written by Peter Schuh   
Wednesday, 12 January 2011 01:40
We have so many things to fret over when building software: Requirements. Quality. Deadlines. Budgets. Scope creep. Dependencies. Audits. Deployment plans. Disaster recovery. Single points of failure. Other systems. Other teams. Other everything. Backouts. Blackouts. Timeouts. Burnout. On call. Fire call. Five nines. Server down. Bad managers. Weak programmers. Ill-suited customers. The random bus. Perhaps [...]

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That Huge Estimate May Be a Vote of No Confidence

Written by Peter Schuh   
Monday, 03 January 2011 01:07
I’ve seen it happen several times. The business requests an upfront, full-cost estimate for some feature or functionality. A business person writes something up – far simpler than the normal story-writing or requirements-drafting process. The development team reviews the write-up. Questions, clarifications and adjustments happen. An estimate is assembled and then KA-BLAM! – everyone is [...]

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Mobile Advertising at the Expense of Usibility and the Corner Pizzeria.

Written by Peter Schuh   
Monday, 27 December 2010 01:29
The “Maps” application on my iPhone used to work great. It pulled up the number of a nearby joint so fast I never bothered to save those numbers to my contacts list. Then, about a month back, something annoying happened. I’d search for a local joint – say Gino’s East, to order pizza – and [...]

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Stop the Insanity. Don’t Track Actuals.

Written by Peter Schuh   
Wednesday, 22 December 2010 01:15
Most project managers want to track actual effort and dollars toward the completion of their projects and deliverables. The goal is obvious and laudable. By knowing the actual cost of something we can provide more precise estimates the next time around. However, I don’t find actuals useful. I have little faith in the quality of [...]

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Kanban: Agile’s Gateway Drug

Written by Peter Schuh   
Wednesday, 01 December 2010 03:20
I’ve always been puzzled why Kanban attracts so much attention in the agile community. At its essence Kanban is workqueue on a wall. Why would any team, delivering within a healthy iterative cadence, switch to a method that does nothing to support a sustainable pace for team members nor provide real delivery planning and predictability [...]

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