Information Technology Dark Side

In 1970, Dr. Winston Royce wrote the paper “that started it all” for waterfall project management in IT. His paper, “Managing The Development of Large Software Systems” outlines an incredibly rigorous process that was adopted by the United States Department of Defense. From there, this approach has spread throughout the IT world until it is [...]

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I have seen a great deal of more vigorous discussion lately along the lines of planning and discipline vs agile approaches. It would seem that the skeptics among us have recovered from the initial shock and awe of the Agile invasion and have begun to form their arguments to counter the variety of Agile points [...]

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Nobody throws parties when project teams finish requirements documents. Or design documents. In fact, there is something incredibly anti-climactic about completing these deliverables when they are also set up as milestones in a phase-based development project. Nothing is as earth-shatteringly exciting as delivering a finished requirements document to a business partner in an IT project. [...]

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There are two experiences in my life that have shaped my views on honest, both in the workplace and at home, more than any other.
The first experience happened in the first week of the first grade. By luck, I had the same first grade teacher as I had had in Kindergarten, Ms. Knockle (sic). Like [...]

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A couple of issues back, Brian Marick suggested an addendum to the Agile Manifesto in Better Software. This, along with the comments about the need for upfront architecture in Tate’s post The Demise of the Gantt Chart, made me think of something I would add to the Agile Manifesto
If you enjoyed this post, make sure [...]

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Tate Stuntz is a contributing editor to TechDarkSide.com and manages projects, services and methodologies for fun and profit. He can be reached at tate.stuntz@nimbleconsulting.com.
Gantt charts look cool. The ones I can make using MS-Project show task names, durations, assigned resources and milestones. All in color…in whatever fonts and fill patterns I want to use. In [...]

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Tate Stuntz is a contributing editor to TechDarkSide.com and manages projects, services and methodologies for fun and profit. He can be reached at tate.stuntz@nimbleconsulting.com.
What is it exactly that separates an Agile project from a ‘non-Agile’ project?

When I tell people I’m a fan of Agile, they ask me what the big deal is, and then they [...]

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Tate Stuntz is a contributing editor to TechDarkSide.com and manages projects, services and methodologies for fun and profit. He can be reached at tate.stuntz@nimbleconsulting.com.
A while back, at a previous employer, I was very happy to have sold my first explicitly Agile project to a customer. I have to say, it was actually pretty easy. All [...]

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Dave Christiansen is the founder and managing editor of TechDarkSide.com. He manages projects for a Fortune 100 financial services company and writes and talks about project management. dave@techdarkside.com.
Lately I’ve been sending out my blog posts to editors to see if they are interested in publishing them. This one got picked up by BizTech Magazine. Check [...]

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Dave Christiansen is the founder and managing editor of TechDarkSide.com. He manages projects for a Fortune 100 financial services company and writes and talks about project management. dave@techdarkside.com.
This is an article I wrote for Redmond Developer News, explaining the way I manage my projects using Microsoft Sharepoint. Check it out and let me know what [...]

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