Understand Your Project Interdependencies Do you have interdependencies in your projects and programs? People on one team need something or someone from another team. Part of the problem is that we use the same word (interdependency) to describe two different problems. Teams can solve sequencing interdependencies. Teams need managers to solve specialist interdependencies. In Sequencing […]
When I talk about Minimum Viable Products or Minimum Viable Experiments, people often tell me that their minimum is several weeks (or months) long. They can’t possibly release anything without doing a ton of work. I ask them questions, to see if they are talking about a Minimum Indispensable Feature Set or a Minimum Adoptable
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke locally about Manage Your Project Portfolio. Part of the talk is about understanding when you need project portfolio management and flowing work through teams. One of the (very sharp) fellows in the audience asked this question: As you grow, don’t you need component teams? I thought that was
I have a new article up on projectmanagement.com, Continuous Agile Program Planning: Think Big, Plan Small. It’s about how to use rolling wave planning especially for an agile program. If you are a Product Owner or you are responsible for planning what when, and want to learn how to do this, join my PPO Workshop, starting
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
Knowledge, Risks, and Guarantees One senior manager in an organization trying to use agile told me about his problems, “We still need to know when the project will be done. We can’t afford the risk of missing the deadline. When we spent all that time on requirements, the team knew what they were doing. We
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
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.
What does “scaling agile” mean to you? For me, there are two ways to think about scaling: one is moving from one project to a program. The other is sharing agile across the business. Let’s talk about moving from a one-team project to agile programs. A program consists of several projects across the organization. While
I am very happy to announce that Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition is out! This edition has these additions from the first edition: A chapter on scaling. How do you move from a team or a couple of groups’ portfolio to the entire organization? Updated chapter on