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Project Management at HotWax: An Overview of our Verified Agile Process

Friday, August 6th, 2010

OFBiz Project Management

OFBiz Project ManagementProject Management at HotWax: An Overview of our Verified Agile Process
The next set of posts that I’m going to dive into revolve around managing your project to completion and the way that HotWax Media structures projects to maximize your success.  We call this process Verified Agile.  As you can tell from it’s name it derives directly from Agile roots, but solves two issues that have routinely plagued companies trying to switch to this methodology: the proximity (everyone, including the client must be in the same physical location) and the lack of confidence in something that seems so dynamic!
We will discuss what problems we are trying to solve for our clients, how tightly integrated and vital clients are to the process and the tools that we use and how we use them to make this process run more smoothly.

The next set of posts that I’m going to dive into revolve around managing your project to completion and the way that HotWax Media structures projects to maximize your success.  We call this process Verified Agile.  As you can tell from it’s name it derives directly from Agile roots, but solves two issues that have routinely plagued companies trying to switch to this methodology: the proximity (everyone, including the client must be in the same physical location) and the lack of confidence in something that seems so dynamic!

We will discuss what problems we are trying to solve for our clients, how tightly integrated and vital clients are to the process and the tools that we use and how we use them to make this process run more smoothly.  Looking forward to digging in and showing you how we do it.

-Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media, an OFBiz service provider, as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

HotWax Media’s Solutions to Project Management Challenges

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Contegix – Partners: Atlassian
In business, like in life, forging partnerships is never an easy thing to do.  As we’ve discussed in previous posts, our partnership with Contegix has made a profound impact on the companies with which we work and how we provide the greatest impact to our customers.
After working with rudimentary collaboration tools – read: not integrated – we went out and purchased a suite of tools that were supposed to solve many of our project management and company workflow challenges.  After working with this software package (no need to name names) for a year and spending countless hours working with their professional services team and our business team, we were unable to make this software even close to the worth the investment.  We learned from our mistakes and took this one to Contegix!
When we did our original research into the project management space, one of the contenders was the Atlassian suite of tools – but just didn’t measure up to the potential promised from the other tool.  In the time between doing our initial evaluation, and the when the competition failed to live up to it’s promise, the Atlassian tools surged forward – and Contegix backed them as their solution to our problems we were facing.
From protecting access to applications and source code to managing documents and documentation – from showing SVN changesets to performing code review – from project management to development workflows – Atlassian has delivered an extensible set of applications that we can build a solid foundation on for our customers and internal teams alike.  Preparing for our next set of posts, the tools we are using at this moment are:
1. Crowd – centralized single sign on – permissions and access – easily pluggable to a variety of applications
2. Confluence – document management and collaboration
3. FishEye – real time reporting of source code repository changes
4. Crucible – code and document review
5. JIRA – project management and tracking
In this post, I had planned on going into detail about our Atlassian support partner, Customware, but we’ll save that for next post.

Atlassian

In business, like in life, forging partnerships is never an easy thing to do.  As we’ve discussed in previous posts, our partnership with Contegix has made a profound impact on the companies with which we work and how we provide the greatest impact to our customers.  Most of you who follow this blog know by now that HotWax Media specializes in OFBiz development.  However, these project management tools can be used no matter what platform you choose to develop in.

After working with rudimentary collaboration tools – read: not integrated – we went out and purchased a suite of tools that were supposed to solve many of our project management and company workflow challenges.  After working with this software package (no need to name names) for a year and spending countless hours working with their professional services team and our business team, we were unable to make this software even close to the worth the investment.  We learned from our mistakes and took this one to Contegix!

When we did our original research into the project management space, one of the contenders was the Atlassian suite of tools – but just didn’t measure up to the potential promised from the other tool.  In the time between doing our initial evaluation, and the when the competition failed to live up to it’s promise, the Atlassian tools surged forward – and Contegix backed them as their solution to our problems we were facing.

From protecting access to applications and source code to managing documents and documentation – from showing SVN changesets to performing code review – from project management to development workflows – Atlassian has delivered an extensible set of applications that we can build a solid foundation on for our customers and internal teams alike.  Preparing for our next set of posts, the tools we are using at this moment are:

  1. Crowd – centralized single sign on – permissions and access – easily pluggable to a variety of applications
  2. Confluence – document management and collaboration
  3. FishEye – real time reporting of source code repository changes
  4. Crucible – code and document review
  5. JIRA – project management and tracking

In this post, I had planned on going into detail about our Atlassian support partner, Customware, but we’ll save that for next post.

-Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media, an OFBiz service provider, as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.