Category: collaboration

How to Talk to Project Managers

October 24, 2008 by mcottmeyer

This week, I have had the distinct pleasure… the rare opportunity… to attend the PMI Global Congress in Denver, Colorado. I missed the deadline to propose a talk but there are at least 5 agile presentation happening over the course of the event. That is really good news. The PMI crowd is interested and trying to understand what this agile stuff is all about.

This week, I am working the VersionOne booth, so while I have a full conference pass, I will probably not going to make any of the talks… bummer.

Talking to Project Managers

It has been really fun talking to all the folks that have come by to see our software. The people that stop to talk to us have already been exposed to agile on some level, so my perspective might be biased, but there are many more agile friendly people that I expected. Again… people are interested and want to know more.

After my first full day of meeting and greeting the conference attendees, there is one thing I would like to share with the agile community. When you talk to a traditional PM about agile project management, you need to be prepared to speak their language. While teamwork and collaboration are important, that is not the language of the PMI crowd. Empowerment is essential but can be very threatening to someone that is accustomed to being "in control".

I've found that a good place to start is with a discussion of the triple constraints.

World wide collaboration

July 1, 2008 by marioale

These days, many large scattered development teams work in medium to very large projects all over the world. This is what's going on for most open source project teams and with companies with geographically distributed teams.

This is the world wide collaboration development era. There's the need for a suitable collaboration software that provides the tools, ease of use and scalability that those teams demand.

At my university, we used GForge open source version ( http://gforge.org ), so I looked at GForge AS from GForge Group ( http://gforgegroup.com ) when I joined my current company in Argentina. They have the older open source version and two newer versions, the free Express Edition and the full Advanced Server. This is an enterprise-grade collaborative development management software, brought by the same people that created SourceForge and GForge open source.