Project management

PowerPoint Architecture

By shoogend at 8 June, 2010, 6:00 pm

It’s a mildly sunny April morning in 2002 when I park my car outside of a huge government agency office in a small suburban city near Utrecht. I am invited for a brainstorm session with the agency’s enterprise architects. Although I do not consider myself an enterprise architect, and explained that upfront, they were eager [...]

Death by landscape

By shoogend at 25 May, 2010, 9:35 pm

Suppose you are in the IT department of a (very) large organization and have been developing systems for your organization for quite some years. Chances are that you will have a landscape of systems great and small that all serve a particular purpose, or that have served a particular purpose. Systems that were built in [...]

The big question. Managing IT projects Barack Obama style

By shoogend at 19 March, 2010, 12:11 pm

Despite misunderstanding and resistance of his space-flight loving people president Barack Obama recently aborted the Constellation space program. The Constellation program targets at putting humans on the moon again, for the first time since 1972, with the ultimate goal of possibly planning a manned trip to Mars in 2025. Although I had never heard of [...]

Service georienteerde projecten vormgeven met smart use cases [In Dutch]

By shoogend at 24 November, 2009, 12:14 pm

This post was originally written to be published as a chapter in an upcoming book on IT architecture. The book will be presented at the Landelijk Architectuur Congres 2009 in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. This post will likely also be published in two parts in Software Release Magazine. Ondanks dat ik inmiddels al zo’n twintig jaar [...]

Serviceorientatie vormgeven met smart use cases [In Dutch]

By shoogend at 23 November, 2009, 5:21 pm

Creative plumbing. Or: rethinking the construction metaphor for software development

By shoogend at 2 July, 2009, 12:57 am

For as long as I’ve been in this business, I’ve heard a lot of manager, project managers, architects and other non-coders compare software development to construction. In this metaphor the architect creates the design and hands it over to the contractor, who does the work. In this metaphor the creative parts ends with the architect [...]

Measuring agile progress in smart use case points

By shoogend at 12 May, 2009, 7:39 pm

Smart use cases serve as a very good unit of work in agile projects. The agile process Smart relies on smart use cases, from start to end. Moreover, the progress in Smart projects is measured and managed using these use cases, and the associated straightforward estimation technique smart estimation. First cut smart use cases A [...]

Delivering products in agile (Smart) projects

By shoogend at 12 May, 2009, 9:27 am

In most cases where a form of agile software development is applied, projects are challenged with difficult issues, such as a swaggering scope, unclear and incomplete requirements, unstable software architecture, are quickly approaching dead lines. Within these strict boundaries projects try to deliver high quality software at high productivity – or velocity. This is not [...]

Hoe we herdefinieren herdefinieren [in Dutch]

By shoogend at 24 March, 2009, 12:59 pm

De voorpagina van de Computable van 20 maart is opgesierd met een prachtige foto van een uit een witte limousine stappend bruidje in een even witte bruidsjurk en prachtige borsten. Nieuwsgierig geworden naar het bijbehorende artikel, kom ik al snel tot de teleurstellende conclusie dat dit weer eens gaat over het mislukken van de gemeentelijke [...]

Project management in agile Smart projects

By shoogend at 9 February, 2009, 2:46 pm

Projects that are run using the agile methodology Smart are split up into short iterations. There are a different types of iterations defined in Smart. These are Propose, Scope, Realize, Finalize and Manage, guiding a project from the first proposal to application management. Each of these iteration types follow a straightforward iteration cycle: plan the [...]