New PM Articles for the Week of November 21 – 27

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New project management articles published on the web during the week of November 21 – 27, 2011.  We read all of this stuff so you don’t have to!  Recommended:

  • Dave Prior has noticed that some organizations have attention deficit disorder, and can’t let their Scrum teams complete a sprint without changing direction.  Result: frustration, and a lack of trust.
  • Glen Alleman presents the three stages of project goat-ness: the “Goat Rope,” the “Goat !@#$,” and the “Goat Rodeo.”  Don’t you wish you worked in the defense industry?
  • Elizabeth Harrin summarizes Elyse Nielson’s presentation from the PMI Global Congress in Dallas last month; subject, “Myths about Project Sponsorship.”
  • Toni Bowers wants you to grade your job as a project manager – stress, compensation, etc.
  • Peter Saddington adds one more artifact to the list: the ScrumMaster Daily Check List.
  • Derek Huether addresses the question, “Is it healthy for Scrum teams to work in a bubble protected from the business around them?”
  • Mark Balbes details four critical practices required for Agile to actually succeed – automated testing, continuous integration, test-driven development, and pair programming,
  • Terry Bunio lists ten practices for estimating Agile projects, successfully.  Hmmm … actually, I think they might apply to non-Agile projects, too.
  • Gary Hamilton, Gareth Byatt and Jeff Hodgkinson say that creating a PMO is a project in itself.  Or, maybe even a program.
  • Mike Griffith shares the slide deck from his “Agile PMO” session, presented at the Calgary APLN meeting last week.
  • Jordan Bortz asks, “Is Scrum just a series of mini waterfalls?”
  • Brien Posey shares a list of ten drawbacks to working in IT.  Personal favorite: “People lie to you all the time.”
  • Bruce Benson offers three metrics that tell a lot more about how the project is going than classics like earned value or burn-down charts.
  • Chuck Morton invokes his inner eighth-grade English teacher in presenting the basics of creating a work breakdown structure.
  • Joe McKendrick lists the 25 worst passwords of 2011, with perennial favorite “password” coming in at the top, and Fox Mulder coming in at ninth, with “trustno1.”

Enjoy!