I’m teaching a Product Owner workshop this week, and I had an insight about a Minimum Viable Product. AN MVP has to fulfill these criteria: Minimum means it’s the smallest chunk of value that allows us to build, measure, and learn. (Yes, Eric Ries’ loop) Viable means the actors/users can use it. Product means you […]
The more I work with project portfolio teams and program managers, the more I understand one thing: Cost accounting makes little sense in the small for agile, maybe for all knowledge work. I should say that I often see cost accounting in the form of activity-based accounting. Each function contributes to some of the cost
I have enough people in the Writing Workshop 1: Write Non-Fiction to Enhance Your Business and Reputation to add a second section. You are right for this workshop if: You are thinking about writing more You want to improve your writing You want to develop a regular habit of writing If a blank piece of
If you’re thinking about agile or trying to use it, you probably started with iterations in some form. You tried (and might be still trying) to estimate what you can fit into an iteration. That’s called “pushing” work, where you commit to some number of items of work in advance. And, if you have to
You might have noticed I have not written as much in this blog for the past couple of months as I normally do. That’s because I’ve been involved in another writing project that’s taken a ton of my time. I’m part of the writing team for the Agile Practice Guide. The Guide is a joint
Agile is iterative and incremental development and frequent delivery with cultural change for transparency. What do the words iterative and incremental mean? Iterative means we take a one-piece-at-a-time for creating an entire feature. Iterative approaches manage the technical risk. We learn about the risk as we iterate through the entire feature set. Incremental means we deliver those
If you are thinking about writing more or better for next year, take a look at my writing workshops. I am offering Writing Workshop 1: Write Non-Fiction to Enhance Your Business and Reputation again, so you can learn how to create a daily writing habit, write in small chunks, and start to publish. I am
I’m doing a Twitter chat November 3 at 4pm Eastern/8pm UK with David Daly. David posted the video of our conversation as prep for the Twitter chat. Today he tweeted this: “How do you optimize for features? That’s flow efficiency.” Yes, I said that. There were several Twitter rants about the use of the word
I started this series writing about the need for coaches in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1. I continued in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 2, talking about the changed role of managers in agile. In this part, let me address the role of senior managers in agile and how coaches might help. For years,
I recently took a vacation in Israel. I had a blast, and I took a lot of great pictures. Back before we had digital cameras, I had an analog camera. It was a good camera—not high-end, but good enough for my purposes. But when I took pictures, I was almost always disappointed by the results.