Chris Davies's Page

I find it hard to understand sometimes, why we pay so much attention to project budgets. Masters theses have been written on the subject of tracking and controlling the project budget.
But why, I have to ask, is that budget, so damned important?

In the IT world, costs usually fall into two categories - hardware and people. You may budget for new servers, cabling, PCs etc and be pretty accurate. You will also need to provide an estimate of the development costs, right? In every company I have ev… Continue

Back in the early nineties I reached a point where I had just one more promotion to shoot for before reaching the end of the (technical) ladder. And there was only one place available in the entire company. So either I stagnated or changed direction. I approached my boss and told him I wanted to go into project management.

"Oh, you don't want this job," he told me emphatically.

The problem was, his job was not project management, but IT team management. We had component-based teams and he ran… Continue

I received an email yesterday inviting me to complete a "State of Agile" survey. I had a little time available so I started merrily clicking on radio buttons, pleased to be contributing to the broader knowledge base of the Agile community.

But then I stopped. Why? I started to realise that the answers I was giving to very black-and-white questions were going to give a false impression of the state of our organisation when it comes to Agile development. Rather than skew the results of the survey… Continue

Today I ran the second in a series of requirements gathering workshops. Afterwards, I drove back to the office and realised that I was not as satisfied with the results as I had been with the first session.

After a little self-analysis, I came to the conclusion that I was particularly happy with the first session because we generated a lot of Post-It notes. The second session merely filled in some of the gaps and completed the breadth of the requirements. I think!

I am still conc… Continue