How Portfolio Management Can Maximize CIO Contribution to Shareholder Value

ZDNet recently ran a piece entitled, “5 Reasons the CIO Can Be a Corporate Sustainability Hero.” Interesting and true, but I felt like they buried the lead as journalists like to say. Sustainability is crucial to this story, but far more powerful when considered in conjunction with the CIO’s impact on his or her company’s...

What the heck are logical models?

Have you ever committed to the repository and got mail afterwards “Hey, this isn’t compiling!”? Likely you committed only some of the changes you made leaving out files required for a successful build. Let’s take a look at a simple example: In this model we have a class element Some Class in my.ecore which extends...

Portfolio Perspectives: Getting the PPM Picture

Welcome to Portfolio Perspectives! I’m excited to present this new blog which will offer insights, thought leadership and points of view on portfolio management and its growing impact across the enterprise. In today’s business climate of perpetual change, the discipline of portfolio management is more critical than ever to help you make timely, informed business...

Put a Spike In It

Spikes in Agile Software Development environments are used to investigate a concept and/or create a simple prototype. Basically, a spike is a quick (typically less than a sprint of effort) exploration by coding of an area in which the development team lacks confidence. The spike is concluded when you learn what you needed to learn....

Eclipse Mylyn 3.6 lights up Indigo, puts an end to faceless builds

Yesterday’s Eclipse Indigo release delivered a year’s worth of improvements on what has become the de facto IDE platform for Java and beyond. The Java package has seen major additions, including the WindowBuilder tool that originated from Instantiations and the m2e plug-in that eases Maven-based builds. EGit 1.0 is an essential tool for the growing...

About WIP Limits and Card Size

One of the new features just released in Planview AgilePlace Kanban is the ability to specify WIP Limits by Card “Size”, instead of the number of Cards in a lane. Earlier this week, after announcing this feature, I got a couple of “Really?” emails like this one, from Arne Roock: Chris, just saw your new features. Most of them...

Introducing Board Cloning! And more!

We are excited to announce a new set of features for our Team Edition based on ideas coming from our best source – you – our customers. We think you’ll agree that these features help move Kanban from the team level to the enterprise, while still retaining our trademark ease-of-use. And just wait ’til you see some...

Make Process Policies Explicit

In his book, Kanban – Successful Evolutionary Change for your Technology Business, David Anderson identified five core properties that have been observed to be present in each successful implementation of the Kanban Method. Visualize the Workflow Limit WIP (work in process) Manage Flow Make Process Policies Explicit Improve Collaboratively (using Models and the Scientific Method) The fourth...

Mylyn visiting Skills Matter

Ever wondered what is going on inside the brain of people working at Tasktop? Last week, I had to honor to speak at Skills Matter, Europe’s largest provider of open-source and agile trainings in the London area. It was a great time in London and Skills Matter was kind enough to provide a recorded version...

A Look Down the (Pipe)Line

As PIPELINE 2011 — a free, Web-based product innovation conference — draws near, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting more than a few of its presenters. Last year, we at Planview started this PIPELINE thing with the initial PIPELINE 2010 conference. We felt there was a great opportunity to leverage a virtual technology platform to...