Projects fail for several reasons and those reasons often vary depending on who you ask. My own opinion, you can track back just about every single failure reason to issues with planning or issues with communication; sometimes both. That is, of course, assuming you have adequate support from […]
Agile is a generic or “umbrella” term for an operational framework or methodology that strives to keep a focus on requirements by using adaptive approaches and continuous improvement practices. A Simple Agile Explanation Not everyone has time to read one of my long-winded explanations on Agile, Scrum, and […]
Quite simply, Osmotic Communication is the accidental overhearing of background information that may later end up being important. The term was coined by Alistair Cockburn, one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto. “Osmotic communication means that information flows into the background hearing of members of the team, […]
Versatility is the name of the game here at Agile-Mercurial. If you can do it with Excel, you should be able to figure out how to do it with Google Sheets. If you can’t figure out how to do it with Excel, check out my tutorials here: Excel VBA […]
If you are using Kanban within Scrum or another Agile framework, you may not need to worry much about this. The meetings used as part of those frameworks should work perfectly fine. This is more meant to be a suggested guide of meeting types if you are embracing […]
If you went through an earlier tutorial on custom issue types I created (Customize Issue Types in Jira), you would have noticed that I modified the Issue Types for one project and one project only. But what if we wanted to create a standard set of Issue Types […]
Outside of the standard name, address, and email questions for job applications, there is one fairly common question that comes up about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time in applications. It seems like a fairly pointless question. It says something along the lines of, “Tell us something that […]
Before we begin, I want to explain what issues are in Jira. Issues are pretty much all of the things you need to do during a project to get it to the end and everything that comes up during a project. You may start with a series of […]
Pedro Manuel Faria is the CEO of a company called In Forming, a spin-off company of Famousgadget Lda. Pedro was kind enough to let me interview him in a rather unconventional fashion, through LinkedIn messaging. Our main discussion topic was the new project management software his company was […]
Phone conferencing can be tricky to navigate. Without really seeing everyone you lack some visual clues as to when someone else may have something to add to the discussion. This can sometimes create scenarios where some people dominate the call and others are never heard from. As […]
To understand Kanban, you must first learn what it is and is not. I covered some of this in What is Kanban?. To sum up that article, there are two different Kanbans – we will call them Lean Kanban and Agile Kanban. Agile Kanban is too often confused […]
Untrained staff, new employees, inexperienced technical resources. If you have been a project manager (predictive or adaptive) for any duration of time, you have had to work with someone who lacked some knowledge in a needed area. You have probably also had tight deadlines and not enough time […]
The Scrum Master is one of three recognized roles in Scrum. They are the servant-leader for the Scrum team, which means they serve the team by working to provide what the team needs to complete their job. This could be working to make sure they have the right […]
Lean, while primarily known for manufacturing, has many tools and ideas that can apply to many industries that have no manufacturing component. Services have wastes, business and operational processes can have waste, software engineering and development has waste… you can find waste everywhere. In Lean, efficiency falls into […]
There are many sources available that discuss Agile and Agile principles. One of the most well-known is the Manifesto For Agile Software Development, which is commonly known as the Agile Manifesto. This includes the 12 Principles behind the manifesto. I personally have some issues with the Agile Manifesto, […]
