By John Rusk on September 8, 2010
This page provides shortcuts to my Earned Value article in the Encyclopedia of Software Engineering.
- Page where you can buy individual articles. Once the encyclopedia is published (Q4 2010) that page will list the “Encyclopedia of Software Engineering” (search it for an article called “Earned Value Management for Software Projects”, to find mine).
- Hard copy of the whole encyclopedia (about 120 articles on other topics, in addition to my one on Earned Value. Each article is about 30 pages and all are peer reviewed by experts in the relevant field.)
I’m sorry but I cannot provide copies of the article here, since the copyright is held by the publisher. By the way, I make no money from the sale of the article, so I hope you’ll consider me reasonbly unbiased when I say that it’s well worth reading. (Well, OK, about as unbiased as an author can be about his own work!).
To those who’ve seen my Earned Value talk with the animated interactive charts, this article does include some important details which I could not fit into the talk – in particular how to obtain objective “progress” numbers, and a dicussion of how Earned Value relates to the critical path on software projects.
Posted in Earned Value Management
By John Rusk on July 8, 2010
Glen Alleman posted on the difficulty (or otherwise) of the maths in EVM, and several of us commented. He followed that with an example in which the maths is very simple, which I quite liked as an introduction to Earned Value.
Marcin Niebudek wrote an article, in which he adds a budget line to an agile burn chart, measuring both in percentages. Nice to see I’m not the only one doing that. (Even if he does draw the chart up the “wrong” way ;-)
Posted in Earned Value Management
By John Rusk on July 2, 2010
I’ll be speaking at the New Zealand Computer Society’s 50th Anniversary Conference, on the topic of Earned Value Management.
I’m looking forward to being part of an interesting conference, and hopefully helping to lift the profile of EVM in New Zealand.
Link to presentation abstract
( The abstract’s reference to “Number 8 wire” may be unclear to overseas readers :-) The phrase simply means “New Zealand ingenuity”, in this part of the world.)
Posted in Earned Value Management, News
By John Rusk on May 30, 2010
I’ve been looking for a way to describe the “essence” of Earned Value Management (EVM). How can I describe the core of what EVM is about – without resorting to an impenetrable jungle of acronyms?
This is particularly important when describing it to people outside EVM’s traditional strongholds of defense and aerospace. Outside those areas, EVM is under-utilised, and I suspect much of the reason is due to its apparent complexity. I’ve been an EVM fan for about 5 years now, and I still come across unfamiliar acronyms. If EVM is to be more widely used, it has to be presented in a way that is accessible to a wide audience.
Here’s what I came up with:
Continue reading “Earned Value in a Nutshell”
Posted in Earned Value Management
By John Rusk on May 28, 2010
This week’s “People Skills for Nerds” post now includes a written transcript of the talk. (For those who, like me, prefer to read than to watch videos ;-)
Posted in News
By John Rusk on May 22, 2010
This video summarises they key points I aim to make in this blog, that people skills are:
- Important, and
- Learnable (with time and practice)
The video is an edited extract of my talk at AgileRoots 2009. For the benefit of people who, like me, prefer skim reading to watching videos, this post also includes a written transcript (below). Continue reading “People Skills for Nerds – a Summary Video”
Posted in People Skills
By John Rusk on May 22, 2010
Regular visitors may notice the site looks a bit different. I am transitioning to Wordpress. Initially, all the old pages will be available both as Wordpress posts and at their old URLs. I will eventually redirect requests for the old ones to the new URLs instead.
By the way, this means commenting finally works properly again.
Posted in News
By John Rusk on May 21, 2010
Most old comments, from before the conversion to WordPress, have unfortunately been lost. (Very sorry!!) I lost them when Haloscan (who I was using for comments) shut down their service. As it happens, there weren’t a large number of comments on any of the pages that used Halscan commenting, possibly because it was somewhat less user-friendly. Commenting should work well now that the site is on WordPress.
Posted in News
By John Rusk on January 22, 2010
Why do so many projects seem to be OK, but, when you get near the end, they turn out not to be OK after all? Everyone thought you were going to make the target date, but at the last minute… well, no you couldn’t.
I’d like to suggest an answer. Let’s illustrate it with an example. Consider an agile project that’s been estimated at 375 points in size. (To my non-agile readers, “points” are just a relative measure of task/feature size. So for instance, a 20 point feature is estimated to require twice as much work as a 10 point one. In this project, all the features add up to 375 points).
Also, imagine that our sample project is scheduled to take 12 weeks and we are now half way through the project. After 6 weeks, the team has completed 132 points’ worth of work. The team leader reports that they are a little behind, since by this time they should have finished 187 points (half of 375). After speaking with everyone on the team, he is confident that they can make up the lost ground.
Question: how much faster will they have to work, if they are to finish the project on time? Continue reading “Does our intuition fail us?”
Posted in Earned Value Management
By John Rusk on July 14, 2009
Presentations from the Agile Roots conference are now online.
My full presentation is here, although sometime I hope to isolate the middle section (on workplace interpersonal skill) so it can be viewed as a stand-alone 15-min presentation. [Done] As it stands, the presentation is 30 minutes on these topics, with 5 mins of questions at the end.
Virtually all the presentations are up now. If you’re wondering where to start, I can recommend Kay Johansen’s excellent session on Agile Testing, which I learnt a lot from; and Jeff Patton’s two-part workshop on story mapping, because story mapping is such an important idea. (And Jeff made it so interesting, it didn’t seem like it was 3 hours long.) I thoroughly enjoyed the whole conference, and can recommend every session that I attended. Now that the videos are up, I’m looking forward to seeing the ones that I missed.
Posted in News