I recently updated a template on my website that I frequently use when either leading iterative development projects or coaching project managers on effective iterative development techniques called the Iteration RouteMap.  The word 'routemap' comes from a South African colleague who used the 'king's english' and insisted that the term routemap was more appropriate than roadmap, the name's stuck ever since!

As far as templates go this one is really quite lightweight, however, there are several key concepts that are important when managing projects in general and iterative projects in particular.  The first is using a mechanism to determine how to size effort.  I typically look at this from the perspective of size and complexity (which is usually a good indication of risk).  Large and complex work items should be started early in the project lifecycle.  I also estimate using Perfect Engineering Days (PEDs), this illustrates how long something should take without interuptions, well defined requirements and all of the other components that can impact how long it actually takes.  A Load Factor is then used to convert PEDs into a realistic estimate.  The Load Factor reflects the productivity of the project and is typically between '2' and '5'.  A '5' reflects a programming language that is either new to the development team or difficult to work with (such as Visual Basic 4/5 within an object oriented development environment).  2 is usually only achieved when the development team has been working on a project for an extended period of time, usually near the latter iterations of the project (when development complexity should be lower). It should be noted that as you actually get some iterations completed you can start substituting the Velocity of your development for the Load Factor. 

The final item is to recognize that there are different Types of functionality/value that will be completed during an iteration.  The logical work items are user stories that represent tangible units of business value that stakeholders can identify and provide feedback on.  However, often these stories need to be supported by 'Infrastructure' stories which ensure a well designed system which can support its non-functional requirements.  In addition, the User Interface (UI) necessary for the story can also be decoupled from the story iteself and is often represented as a separate work item. 

Hopefully this template will be useful to both those just starting their agile/iterative development initiatives as well as those who have been doing this type of rowkr for awhile.  As usual, please feel free to email me with comments.

One of things that I personally think is important is ensuring a safe and productive workplace for people in order to maximize their potential.  Part of this comes from ensuring a safe work environment and instituting a culture of tolerance and respect, however, another dimension that I think is also important is ensuring that the workplace is also 'fun'.  If you can have fun in your workplace my logical extension is that you must feel safe since its hard to have fun when you're feeling threatened or worried.  When I was the VP of Delivery Services at Valtech I ensured that each one of our Development Centers had some kind of 'activity center', Wii's and Guitar Hero, Ping Pong tables and electronic dartboards were all available for tournaments and just casual play.  We even had an official World of Warcraft guild for employees and spouses (and there were a lot of spouses!).  When I was at BMC one of the events I organized for my staff was a rather remarkable scavenger hunt/trivia pursuit/cranium game that was provisioned by a company called The Go Game.  It was probably the best team building event that I've ever been involved in and the company was creative enough to customize the game so that our India team could participate as well.  Of course, I come by this honestly having spent my early years running a small company that provided Doom network gaming tournaments.

By adding some 'fun' to the workplace it's opened up new communication channels amongst staff and it's allowed people to connect in ways beyond their work commitments.  It's a tricky area of course, one person's 'fun' is not always anothers.  When I took over at Valtech the only organizational fun was playing poker, however, not everyone enjoyed playing and felt excluded and even resentful that this was the only way to interact with their colleagues outside of work.

However, it seems that you can take the whole of idea of fun in the workplace to a whole new level.  I read an interesting article in the Utne Reader about the "infantilization of corporate America" which describes companies pushing the boundaries of this idea of fun to the point that employees feel like children in school.  Clearly there are some 'dos and don'ts' when pursuing these ideas!

Initially, I was skeptical about a social-networking tool like this as it emphasized activities not outcomes.  However, upon reflection and reading an interesting article from on my old alumni-BMC blog, I now think this would be a very powerful tool particularly for geographically dispersed teams. Although Twitter emphasizes activities, its these activities that connect people in a community and a software development team represents a focused community.  Having a tool that allows team members to understand the activities that others are engaged in provides visibility that can only be accomplished when working in the same general area.  In larger companies and in globally distributed projects it's not practical/possible to have teams working together.  Twitter and some of the other micro-blogging services like Pownce (which allows you to blast out links to events and even files... which would be useful when a document had been updated) fill a void that other tools like Wikis (Atlassian Confluence), Version Control solutions (Subversion), IM solutions (Jabber), Communication tools (Skype) and Application Lifecycle products (Rally) don't address.  At some point all of this seems likely to converge but until then it will be necessary to stitch together these solutions to really ensure effective collaboration of your teams.

If you're using any of these Web 2.0 tools in your environment I'd be interested in hearing about their benefits and what effective practices you've discovered.