Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working […]
I keep hearing a lot about “chief” this and “chief” that when it comes to Big Agile, aka program management. You know, chief product owner, chief architect, that kind of thing. I’m kind of puzzled. I thought agile was all about self organization and no command-and-control. Chief anything reeks of command-and-control to me. At the
One of my program management clients is organizing a program and is having trouble thinking about a delivery model that fits their program. They are transitioning to agile and are accustomed to traditional releases. When I suggested they have someone representing deployment on their core team, that was an initial shock to their system, and
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always
I hope that this 3-part series on how to move to continuous integration and how to evaluate if it’s worth moving to continuous integration on your program convinced you moving to continuous integration was worth it for programs. The reason continuous integration is an issue on programs, is because the lack of CI can delay
To continue our story from part 1 and part 2… The teams have determined their individual impediments to Continuous Integration. You, as the technical program manager, and the technical program team can take those impediments, with input from the teams can see the impediments to program-wide continuous integration. You have used a similar problem-solving approach,
Let’s set the context (which I did not do in my most recent post–sorry). Define a Program A program is composed of several feature teams, which may well be working on several projects or different feature sets. I assume they are. The goal of a program supersedes the goal of any of the projects, and
I like continuous integration. A lot. I started being an aficionado of continuous integration back in my senior year of university. It was my very first (and last) team project in my college career. There were three of us. The project manager waited until the night before the project was due to get us all
Some program managers whose organizations are transitioning to agile are not always clear on which program team they are managing. Sometimes, that’s because the organization doesn’t always realize they need more than one program team. If you are coordinating and collaborating across the entire organization, you are part of the core program team. If you