As a consultant, I create many kinds of information products: both writing and speaking. I use the ideas of experiments and finalization to decide what to ship and when. That allows me the most flexibility in my product development. However, too many organizations don’t differentiate between what they need to ship as experiments and when […]
Regardless of whether you work inside an organization or you work for yourself, the start of the new year allows all of us to reset and restart. That means too many of us think we need to “plan” for an entire year. Before you consider an entire year, reflect on last year: How much of
Many of my middle-management and senior leadership clients want certainty about future work. That’s one of the reasons they create huge backlogs and long roadmaps. Yet, even those backlogs and roadmaps don’t offer certainty. One of these managers said, “I have so much uncertainty and ambiguity. I feel as if I can’t make a good,
I started this series with the issues of trying to estimate/predict a specific backlog item quarters away, not even weeks away. (Even weeks away is iffy because the entropy is the default state for the world.) In Part 1, I suggested that the team can use cycle time, but even with cycle time, we need
In How to Predict When the Team Will Complete a Specific Backlog Item, Part 1, I said there was no way to accurately predict an estimate for a specific backlog item more than a month away. I did suggest several options if you want to go through the motions, but there’s no accurate answer to
Your team has one of those long roadmaps or a long backlog. They’re working, delivering about two items (full stories) a week. Then, your manager asks you this question: “That feature set in six months: when will you start it and when will you finish it?” “We could start it now,” you say, “assuming we
Sid, a senior leader, wants the benefits of an agile transformation. While he doesn’t care about agility per se, he wants the organization to be more effective. His goals: Open new markets for their products. Gain new customers in those markets. Retain more current customers. He suspects that if the teams release faster, the organization can achieve those
Sherry, a middle manager in a relatively small organization, said, “We can’t plan for an entire quarter at a time. Our managers need to change what they want more often than that. But I’d like to plan for a quarter at a time and I really don’t want to ask people to multitask. What do
At a recent client, a senior leader, Tim, said, “We realize we can’t do everything, but we don’t know how to get a handle on what we need to do.” We talked about what they measured and how long it took them to make decisions. (See Why Minimize Management Decision Time.) Tim explained that they
Several people on social media have denigrated the terms “project manager” and “program manager.” These people claim there is no need for either role in an effective team, especially an agile team because the team can manage its own deliverables. While some agile teams can manage their own deliverables, that’s not the only role for