Showing posts with label introducing agile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label introducing agile. Show all posts

May 22, 2011

What Makes a Project Successful?

The other day I had the opportunity of introducing agile to a client. I usually do that by walking through how Scrum works; backlog, sprints, sprint planning and spending time talking about organizations and how they deal with change. 

That approach usually works well, but this time I decided to use another approach. I simply posed this question to the team:

What makes a software project successful?

After a short, but great discussion they came up with the following answer:
  • Specification - So we know what to build.
  • Estimation and milestones - How long will it take.
  • Project manager - Keeps project on target.
  • Resource utilization - So people have things to do all the time.
  • Testing - So we know it works.
Quite possible it was the first time they had ever talked about it, so I'd say this was a new experience for them. 

To make it a bit more interesting, I had prepared a list of my own what I think is most important in a project: