If you’ve read Reasons for Continuous Planning, you might be wondering, “How can we do this?” Here are some ideas. You have a couple of preconditions: The teams get to done on features often. I like small stories that the team can finish in a day or so. The teams continuously integrate their features. Frequent features […]
A cargo cult occurs when people adopt rituals expecting some good behavior to occur. They really don’t know why they are doing these rituals and don’t understand the reasons behind them, yet they keep doing the rituals expecting great results. In this article, I’ll give two contrasting examples that I’m familiar with: Project A talks
I’m working on the program management book, specifically on the release planning chapter. One of the problems I see in programs is that the organization/senior management/product manager wants a “commitment” for an entire quarter. Since they think in quarter-long roadmaps, that’s not unreasonable—from their perspective. There is a problem with commitments and the need for
In agile, we separate the Product Owner function from functional (development) management. The reason is that we want the people who can understand and evaluate the business value to articulate the business value to tell the people who understand the work’s value when to implement what. The technical folks determine how to implement the what.
The lovely folks at Thoughtworks interviewed me for a blog post, Embracing the Zen of Program Management. I hope you like the information there. If you want to know about agile and lean program management, see Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization. In beta now.
Ryan Ripley “highly recommends” Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Cost or Schedule. See his post: Pragmatic Agile Estimation: Predicting the Unpredictable. He says this: This is a practical book about the work of creating software and providing estimates when needed. Her estimation troubleshooting guide highlights many of the hidden issues with estimating such as:
You have an offer. It’s lower than what you expected. You know that the higher your starting salary in a job, the more money you make over your lifetime. If you get “behind” in your salary, it’s difficult to catch up. How do you know what to ask for and how can you do it?
Many product owners have a tough problem. They need so many of the potential features in the roadmap, that they feel as if everything is #1 priority. They realize they can’t actually have everything as #1, and it’s quite difficult for them to rank the features. This is the same problem as ranking for the
We encounter problems all the time. Some we can resolve on our own in a couple of minutes. Some take more time, and/or we can’t resolve them alone. What do you do then? I’ve had a policy for about twenty years for when I become stuck. If I’m stuck for more than twenty minutes, it’s
You’ve been at your company for a while. You’ve hired a number of the people you work with, or you work closely with them. They are your “work family.” Now, you’re thinking about looking for a job. You think you owe something to your team. Do you? Consider your perspective. Who do you owe what?