The sub-pages herein are some provide a flavor of the kinds process considerations that have arose in work done for our clients.

Why Agile Projects Fail - Within an agile environment, certain subtle disfunctional system dynamic can arise that can derail the project. This page describes one such situation bases on a real-world case study.

Mitigating Risk from Scope Uncertainty - This is a write-up on scope management within Agile project. It emphasizes getting an early handle on unknown scope that would otherwise rear its ugly head and cause a crisis later on in the project. It also describes how to incorporate probability into team LOE estimates to make them more realistic.

Product Backlog and the Cone of Uncertainty - speaks more directly to why many Agile project fail. The root cause is the crisis of unknown scope coming to light after a few iterations. Typically this scope goes unmeasured and the other parts of the triple-constraint are not updated to compensate. The result is generally a crisis near the end of the project where everyone realizes that the project will not be done on time and time is running out. By attending to this early, projects can compensate to succeed.

Right-Sizing Iterations discusses how determine the best length of an Agile development iteration (Scrum in this example). It also introduces a new metric, the "In Play Profile" that can be used as an early-warning indicator for when an iteration is in trouble. I have found this useful in cases where the development staff is insular and pushes back against allowing anyone to have direct visibility into their activities.

Sample Metrics Analysis demonstrates the kind of data that can be pulled together and normalized to compare the state of one release to previous ones to get a sense of risk to meeting a release date with a low level of defects. In this example, the metrics are being captured during a RUP Transition Phase.The metrics are generally composite and focused on productivity.