2012年5月31日 星期四

Project Management and Trading

One of my personal goals is to be a professional trader, which means not just an average, typical trader but someone who can pull the trigger and make a trading decision. In pursuit of this goal, I continually study the publications and life history of many greatest traders of all time, for example, Jesse Livermore, W.D. Gann, H.M. Gartley. I found the principles in trading were quite applicable to project management, one of my professions.

In "The Gartley Trading Method", it says "A humble man knows he will make mistakes, expects them, embraces them, learns from them, and then makes fewer mistakes going forward. An arrogant man thinks he is perfect, takes his losses personally, pretends that the losses didn't happen, doesn't from his mistakes, and is doomed to repeat them." and "... the common theme of the great traders is that at some time they all have blown up or experienced a loss of most of their trading capital. It almost seems like a prerequisite to becoming a legend!"

So, what is the important point there? Review, retrospective, lesson learned, and continuous improvement. They are things in common with what the project management theory advocates; however, I seldom meet a project team (even though I involved) that could do so humbly. Agile frameworks emphasize these things explicitly and try to infuse them to teams' habit implicitly.

Be frank and courageous to admit mistakes, and you will be a legend someday, just similar to being a professional trader.

Agile Project Management in Practice URLs

Here are some useful URLs relevant to agile software development and project management:

Flow
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_%28psychology%29

Pair Programming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqYqQUfPCp8

Extreme Programming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_2PfTvXBeA

Daily Stand-up
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_R9wQY4G5I

The Power of Focus
http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Focus-Achievers-Financial/dp/1558747524

Taskboard
http://agilevideos.com/videos/agile-simulation-part-1-meet-the-agile-team-2/

Theory of Constraints
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UqWejurWwU&feature=related

Kanban
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Ud7pEhpQM&feature=fvwrel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LejHPwrqGvE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EIMxyFw9T8&feature=related

Release Planning
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM3IYw8Xz18&feature=channel&list=UL

Feature Driven Development
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHQXtfUvkCg

Planning Poker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAxYMek5jY4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxLRNTSBXds

User Story
http://www.rallydev.com/resource/user-stories-guide

Sprint Review
http://www.youtubecom/watch?v=2Jhf7PcYrzY

Sprint Retrospective
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFLvQXMNrO8&feature=relmfu

Software Development Anti-Patterns Catalog
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AntiPatternsCatalog

Scrum and XP from the Trenches
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/kanban-scrum-minibook

Hudson Continuous Integration
http://hudson-ci.org/

Sonar
http://www.sonarsource.org/

Laurie Williams
http://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/publications.html

Radmind
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/

Agile EVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIROtlvdahY
http://leadinganswers.typepad.com/leading_answers/files/rp2_cabri_griffiths_agile_and_earned_value_reporting.pdf

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
http://www.fmeainfocentre.com/examples/FMEA%20Electric%20circuit.jpg

Good luck, guys!