Calendar of Events

The Milestone-Kanban is a hybrid project scheduling and management technique that combines traditional and agile best practices. The technique is optimized for knowledge-work projects where the deliverables are clear, but the time and effort needed to create them are not. It embraces iterative planning, uses milestones to establish a project roadmap, a Kanban board to manage the work, and stand-up meetings to track progress.

Traditional project management techniques use work breakdown structures (WBS), Gantt charts, and the critical path method to create the schedule. The underlying assumption that the work is well-defined and the required effort can be easily estimated is a shortcoming of these approaches.

Agile projects use iterative and incremental delivery, which enables flexibility. However, they do not require (but may use) a roadmap to communicate and set expectations for future work. Teams use easily accessible visual reporting tools and update their status daily, which promotes transparency.

Milestone-Kanban bridges these practices to create a robust, lightweight, and flexible framework for planning many types of projects and managing their performance. The technique uses a simple five-step process to create and maintain the project schedule:

• Step 1: Define the Deliverables

• Step 2: Create a Roadmap

• Step 3: Build the Kanban

• Step 4: Monitor Progress

• Step 5: Plan Iteratively

Presenter Bio

Alan Zucker has over 25 years of experience leading projects and project organizations in Fortune 100 companies.

Now, he is an instructor, consultant, and coach, sharing his leadership and project management knowledge with businesses across the country and around the world. He teaches at several leading universities and national training companies, and his clients include Fortune 500 companies.

Alan has his PMP®, PMI-ACP®, Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM), and Coach (DAC) certifications from the Project Management Institute. He also holds advanced certifications from Scrum Alliance and Scaled Agile.