Stanford and Salesforce.com Present “Project Management 2.0” in Action Project management has no “one size fits all” approach, but the agile rollout at salesforce.com holds lessons for many companies looking to change their production processes to meet today’s challenges. Stanford University’s Advanced Project Management Program now presents the company’s compelling success story as a real-world example of core principles taught in the certificate’s overview course, Converting Strategy Into Action. In today’s complex, fast-paced business environments, traditional “project management as usual” practices don’t work; companies need to combine proven approaches with emerging concepts to align their project initiatives with strategic goals. Chris Fry, salesforce.com vice president of Platform Development and Steve Greene, senior director of Tools and Agile Development, present the company’s successful switch from a waterfall system to an agile-based system — from the traditional, sequential system to an emergent, iterative and empirical system. The conversion is one of industry’s largest and fastest agile transformations. In 2006, the seven-year-old software company was growing at an extremely fast pace and experiencing growing pains within the R&D organization. Fry and Greene suggested a pilot program to incrementally transition to an agile-based system. After listening to their description of the proposed changes, Parker Harris, a salesforce.com founder and executive vice president, felt drastic change was needed. He charged the two managers to go for broke, and complete the transformation throughout the R&D organization in three months. Noble Denton gets Spanish project management contract SPAIN: Offshore engineering and marine consulting firm Noble Denton has been awarded a EUR 15 million (US$20.9 million) contract from ACS Cobra Castor UTE in Spain. The scope of work includes the provision of project management and procurement support services for Castor's underground gas-storage development initiative. The project will run over a four-year period and involve up to 25 Noble Denton personnel. The technical specification of the work will comprise a wellhead platform bridge linked to a production, utilities and quarters platform in around 60 meters (196.8 ft) of water. The platform will support gas injection into the reservoir at flow rates up to 8 MMscm/d (282.5 MMcf/d) and gas withdrawal and transfer to shore at up to 25 MMscm/d (882.8 MMcf/d).