Posts Tagged ‘best practices’

Mention of the word, “methodology” need not elicit groans.  Without a repeatable approach to projects it’s easy to miss key requirements, expectations, errors, etc.   So use a software developer methodology for your project. Which methodology to use? Frankly, I don’t care which methodology you use as long as it’s not a waterfall methodology.   I’ve been […]

Any project will have change.  No one project ever includes the entire scope or has complete buy in from all the stakeholders or goes off without some major issue.   That means you have to both budget for it and plan the process by which you will accept change. Step 1: Don’t be Afraid of It […]

In Part 7 of the series, I wrote about the importance of using an experienced core team.  However, every single resource on your project will not be a senior resource with years of relevant experience and that is the focus of this post.  If you do throw resources into the fire and expect them to […]

Brad Nunnally in our User Experience group pushed this out to a bunch of people via Yammer which we are starting to use a bunch.  Anyway, Fred Beecher does a great job of describing the pains of using a requirements driven approach and where it fails.  He also has a nice graphic outlining a hybrid […]

From an organization perspective, after getting a decent project manager or scrum master, you need to have a place to share everything about the project.  I personally don’t care if you use IBM Quickr, Microsoft Sharepoint, Confluence Wiki, or eProject.  You just need to get a place to share the following: Documents that are deliverables […]

Use an Experienced Core Team Part 7 in our series is perhaps one of the most important: Use an Experienced Core Team.  “We have a bunch of smart people and they can figure this portal thing out” is a sure way to put your project in jeopardy.  I cannot stress enough how important having the […]

“I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” -Robert McCloskey, former U.S. State Department spokesman Regardless of how your software project is organized, how it is being run, or what you are building, sooner […]

The value of a portal comes from the time saved in putting out new functionality.  It means getting to market more quickly with new products.  A portal should allow quicker turn around when the business requests a change or enhancement.  Because portal is loosely coupled and provides a lot of configurable services out of the […]

Welcome to day number 5 in our series.  Sometimes out of the box portal capabilities are not perfect.  Perhaps some of them don’t even meet 90% of your requirements.  Does this mean you should develop a custom home grown solution?  Well, not unless you want to spend a lot more money and take a lot […]

Don’t Forget Your Users Does anyone think it is easy to design a great user experience when you do not involve real users?  I am really suprised at just how many customers think it is and then wind up re-working much of their portal after releasing to production.  While this may be a shortcut to […]

Don’t Forget Your Users Does anyone think it is easy to design a great user experience when you do not involve real users?  I am really suprised at just how many customers think it is and then wind up re-working much of their portal after releasing to production.  While this may be a shortcut to […]

For any given project, I see a common occurrence, at least one technology will be new or almost new.  Resources won’t have ramped on it.  In many cases, you may have a completely new development environment.   Both these issues can easily cause your project to head south or even to fail entirely.   That doesn’t need […]