We all encounter things at work that impede our progress. Having the skill to effectively deal with the roadblocks makes a big difference in your overall productivity. Will you get a reputation as a whiner or as someone who pushes through obstacles? In this week's column, Danny Faught offers help with two common types of roadblocks and gives suggestions for reducing the chances that any barricade will impact your schedule.

Software development organizations have evolved to meet the challenges put forth by ever increasing complexity in both the problem spaces and the technologies applied. Unfortunately, the right people for a project may not all be located in the same city or at the same time.

Dot Tudor is a practicioner of DSDM, one of the early Agile Methodologies that has taken hold in Europe and the UK but has not made the jump to the states yet. DSDM has a more formalized prioritization process that is refered to as the MoSCoW process - Must Have- Should Have- Could Have - Won't Have.

In modern software development there are two trends that allow people to get more for less: agile development and offshore outsourcing. Agile processes are traditionally implemented in one site, where customers and developers can meet face-to-face and communicate easily. Offshore development projects, on the other hand, are traditionally implemented as fixed-bid consulting agreements, executed either using waterfall processes or at best in iterative way. However, it is possible to use agile software development process when working with offshore teams. Our successful projects have employed a mix of agile techniques and organizational models.