• What is Timeboxing?
For those newbie’s to IT Project Management, Time boxing is where a group of tasks are given a fixed period of time to be completed. Time Boxing is often used in project management, not just to set the delivery goals for small groups of tasks, but rightly or wrongly to set the delivery date for entire projects /programmes of work.
• Different Timeboxing techniques
“Top-Down” Timeboxing
The “Top Down” setting of a Timebox is where management dictates what product is produced - where, how, when and with what resource.
“Top Down” is often used at project level by sponsors /clients wanting to set a delivery date for a project of specified scope /quality /cost.
Usually no attempt is made to discover whether such a project is feasible other than a “gestimate” by the senior management and sponsor. At project level I have never seen a top down timebox plan work to time without significant stripping out of scope and quality. Often the descoping has been so aggressive that very often the IT system delivered has failed to remotely achieve its original business case objectives.
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Some weeks ago I published a post entitled - Management Consultants Friends or Foe where I reported on an article I had read in the Daily Mail. In it Dr Paul Miller, leader of Britain’s hospitital doctors (Chairman of the British Medical Association Consultants Committee), mocked Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt’s recent boast that the HNS has had its best year ever. “How deluded can one get?”
The core of the article was the fact that the NHS was spending some £1 billion on Management Consultants last year, and the NHS was getting precious little for this money in terms of efficiency savings /fully functioning IT systems.
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I promise in the next few weeks to concentrate on other subjects other than AGILE and its deficiencies, but my readership statistics show that AGILE is a popular subject. I also feel I have to keep up with my protagonists comments, which are appearing not just on my blog but all over the net.
At the moment, the net is buzzing with AGILE evangelist websites and Blogs making statements like “the AGILE manifesto is the equivalent to Newton 4th Law of Motion”. When someone takes a fanatical belief in anything without proper empirical evidence you have got to start thinking!!. Please see my post Storm in a Tea Cup. I really think these evangelists do not expect us to engage our brains. They think if they keep repeating the common look-up list of humorous slogans about AGILE’s invincibility, we will all be conditioned into turning a blind eye to the detail and asking for verifiable and independent evidence concerning this approach’s claimed scalability and prowess over other methods /approaches. At the moment the whole IT methods industry from Waterfall to RUP to AGILE and SCRUM is in need of consolidation based on some sound independent research. As we speak, large corporations take huge “flip flop” financial gambles adopting this method over another, largely based on the word of lightweight fee-earning consultants.
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My IT Management Philosophy has always been based on four key principals
which I have always considered to be independent of the current ‘flavour of the month’ in terms of IT development /project management methods:-
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Posted by Kevin Brady on Sun 13th August 2006 at 01:37 PM, Filed in Book Reviews
One of my favourite Project Management Blogs is Carpe Factum run by Timothy Johnson. Carpe Factum. Timothy’s blog discuss’s all kinds of topics but essentially he focuses on the dry subject of Project Management (my passion). Timothy has a good blog writing style and manages to make often quite serious points in an interesting and humorous way. Bearing in mind the subject of his Blog this is a real challenge!
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Available on Amazon - Race Through the Forest A Project Management Fable - By Timothy Johnson
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