Which are the key qualities that is required to become a great project manager?

OptimismTeam orientationCommunication skillsContinue

Started by Abrachan Pudusserry Feb 2.

lean startup

"Lean startup" is a term coined by Eric Ries, his method advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster than via more traditional product development practices, such as the Waterfall model. It is not uncommon to see Lean Startups release new code to production multiple times a day, often using a practice known as Continuous Deployment.According to the New York Times, "The term 'lean start-up' was coined by Mr. Ries, 31, an engineer, entrepreneur and blogger. His inspiration, he says, was the lean manufacturing process, fine-tuned in Japanese factories decades ago and focused on eliminating any work or investment that doesn’t produce value for customers."Lean startup is sometimes described as Lean Thinking applied to the entrepreneurial process. A central tenet of Lean Thinking is to reduce waste. Lean startup processes reduce waste by increasing the frequency of contact with real customers, therefore testing and avoiding incorrect market assumptions as early as possible. This approach attempts to improve on historical entrepreneurial tactics by reducing the work required to assess assumptions about the market, and to decrease the time it takes a business to find market traction. This is referred to as…Continue

Tags: startup, lean

Started by Abrachan Pudusserry Dec 29, 2011.

First hand experience on PMI-ACP Certification

It is a 3 hour online test, with 120 questions to be taken at the prometric testing centers. Not very difficult provided one has solid knowledge/experience about SCRUM and XP. One must really understand what is servant leadership. One has to be obsessed with providing value to the team, and has to be always pro-team. Must understand the actors, their roles, artifacts and the workflow in which they are produced for both XP and SCRUM. Should have a thorough understanding of agile manifesto, agile principles and values. If you know and understand the subject inside out, exam is not a problem. Most of the questions are straight forward. Some involve reading a graph or a sequence and then trying to make some meaning out of it (burn down chart, release planning etc)Benefits to the agile practitionerSo far my knowledge was confined to SCRUM. Preparation for PMI-ACP forced me to look into other models and their jargons and best practices. Now my project management, to be precise agile vocabulary have improved, and I am aware of more tools and techniques which will be of use to every agile enthusiast.   Continue

Started by Abrachan Pudusserry Oct 18, 2011.

Tips for Scrum teams - Servant leadership

The contextAgile project management, especially Scrum revolves around self organizing teams. The work is volunteered not allocated.The Scrum master is not supposed to track the work very closely by asking for the status (percentage completion), every now and then. The daily scrum meeting is a status update meeting and not a review meeting where the scrum master can ask questions about the progress. All these points to one question, in a self organizing team, how do one become a leader. Servant leadership is the answer. That forces me to re-open the book 'Servant leadership, a journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness', by Robert K Greenleaf, which was in my book collection, gathering dust for more than a decade. Now it is time to revisit it to understand it within the context of agile, self organizing teams.The chapter-1 titled 'Servant as leader', asks these fundamental questions about leadership;Servant and Leader - Can these two roles be fused in one real person, in levels of status or calling?If so, can that person live and be productive in the real world of the present?In the words of the Author Robert K Greenleaf;" The idea of servant as leader came out of reading Hermann Hesse's Journey to the east. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey. The central figure of the story is Leo, who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well, until Leo disappears. . Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, who he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, it's guiding spirit, a great and noble leader..The great leader is seen as servant first, and that…Continue

Started by Abrachan Pudusserry Sep 18, 2011.