Agile SWAT Teams

Create a high performance elite project team is must have for every program or organization.

SWAT teams are the most specialized and experienced team that you can build to be used in extremely complex projects and emergency situations.

SWAT teams are the silver bullet, but beware though that there is only one bullet so better we learn how to do it.

Agile War Rooms

War rooms are a very old agile concept and the first big investment on the project success. If your team members consider that the project doesn't not need a war room, project goals are not so challenging, project is not so important or they are not interested on it.
"I'm beginning to think that a project not worth a war room may be a project not worth doing."

We may think that this old concept could be related to the old school management theory, but if you take a min to review it deeply, it's the most agile concept ever.

So, in this post you will find why and how to create a great agile war room from the ground up.

Agile Zombies

Nowadays companies announce that they are 100% Agile more as a marketing speech than as a strong belief and project teams also tend to follow agile processes as zombies. Nobody, neither the companies nor the project teams, knows what they are doing and that's why the meaning of agile concepts are getting lost.
This post offers a quick list to identify if your company is one of those, if you are being a zombie and if that is so, to solve it quickly.

Plan your bench

We all know that bench costs money, but it doesn't mean you should not have bench, it means you need to manage it wisely.

Every project manager would do anything to get an extra week when the project is in trouble but time is a variable you may not be able to adjust.

Manage maintenance operations

Maintenance operation are requires a special management strategy. The typical problem with maintenance is the software entropy. On other words, the older your code gets the more lines of code it accumulates, the more closely coupled modules become and the higher the effort to maintain and evolve your product. So, what should we do with old software?

7 project lies that everyone has heard

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it or found it written in a report. People that run projects tend to lie and polish the words to sound fancy. Politicians do the same and running a project is also a political thing.

So, here is a summary of what you may hear and the real translation for those words.

How to write great status reports

Newspapers use sales and marketing concepts in order to catch people attention and sell their ideas or products. So, if our status reports have – in essence - the same goals, how can we use those concepts in our reporting process?

Status Reports are a powerful tool that needs to be used by successful managers to help achieve the project goals. Most of the times, it’s the only opportunity you have to sell your project, request priority treatment or escalate issues with your CEOs, sponsors, etc.

All you need is strategy

Are we there yet? The most annoying question may only be answered if we have a strategy.

We used to think that managing a project was mainly about creating a very comprehensive plan that includes scope, estimates, tasks, etc. However, in a world that values more adapting to constant changes than anything else, those plans are not really the answer and we need something else, the strategy.

Distributed Teams?

Building the team is one of the most important factors that will determine the project success. This post is not about how to use the last and coolest technology to work in a distributed team, but to show that although staffing a remote team could be a valid alternative, it hurts the team and we need to learn how to manage it.

Note: there is no need to explain why, just google "team collocation".

Staffing people in remote locations is like going into debt. Yes, I'm using the famous technical debt concept developed by Ward Cunningham. OOPSLA 1992
As a PM you can decide to hire a remote developer and take on that debt, but you also need to think that every day that developer is assigned to your project, you will keep on accruing interests and it will be harder to replace that person/team and recover from it.