e2.oh » pmbok http://www.e2oh.com Investigations Into Enterprise 2.0 Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:15:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Iterative Projects http://www.e2oh.com/2008/04/26/iterative-projects/ http://www.e2oh.com/2008/04/26/iterative-projects/#comments Sun, 27 Apr 2008 01:39:29 +0000 Jay Hariani http://www.e2oh.com/2008/04/26/iterative-projects/ At work, I’ve been busily cranking away at deploying Atlassian Confluence to our firm’s internal users (a case study will be going up at wikipatterns.com within the next few weeks). One interesting aspect of Confluence is that Atlassian builds it using the agile development process – iterative releases every few weeks. Because of this, we’ve had to adapt our project to match the quick release cycle. We’ve diligently upgraded to almost all of the new releases Atlassian has pushed out over the course of the last year.

Overall, users love this – typically, they are used to extremely lengthy product release cycles from “Big IT” software vendors. Now, they look forward to new releases and the quicker, less disruptive evolution of the product.

Iterative project management seems so intuitive, it makes me wonder how many project managers have taken techniques like agile or scrum and applied them to non-software development projects. As a project manager, having incremental, small milestones that deliver a portion of the project’s value every few weeks seems to have several advantages – it would make projects easier to manage and monitor, and clients get to see the results of their investment quickly, and provide regular feedback into the iterative process.

Is anyone out there using these techniques for generalized project management? Has it been used this way in the past? It seems a bit counter to the highly planned and orchestrated PMBOK way of doing things.

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