3 Quick Project Portfolio Tips The second edition of Manage Your Project Portfolio is available now, in ebook and paper. I’m so excited. To celebrate, here are three tips to help you manage your project portfolio. Tip 1. Make your work visible. When I lead workshops to help people understand how to manage their project […]
A project manager proudly told me he was agile. “We do standups every day. We work in iterations.” I asked, “How does the product owner like what you deliver every day or so?” “Oh, we only deliver once we have a hardening sprint, after our three development sprints.” He continued to describe what they do:
An agile coach asked me this question, “What tool should our senior leadership use for managing the program/portfolio?” That question told me these things: Her leadership is confused about the difference between a program (one business deliverable composed of many projects) and the project portfolio (a picture of the committed work that implements the organizational
Impediments will occur on any project; agile projects are no exception to risks. Agile succeeds because you are more likely to see the problem before it becomes a disaster. Two developers got the flu. Your tester has jury duty. The team can’t figure out what the design should be for a specific feature and it’s
Plan, Plan, Plan Do you like planning? You might be one of those people who likes to make lists and plan in great detail. I love my lists. I’m not big on huge, ginormous plans, but I do like a list of what to do now and the picture of where I’m headed. You might
In Part 1, I talked about small stories/chunks of work, checking in all the time so you could build often and see progress. That assumes you know what done means. Project “done” means release criteria. Here are some stories about how I started using release criteria. Back in the 70s, I worked in a small development group.
Would you like to release your product at any time? I like it when releases are a business decision, not a result of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s possible, and it might not be easy for you. Here are some stories that showed you how I did it, long ago and more recently. Story 1: Many years
(I updated this post in May 2025 to more carefully describe what I mean by collaboration and how that differs from cooperation. I struck through collaboration when I meant cooperation.) A colleague asked mobbing last week on Twitter. Here’s the short answer, including pairing so you can see everything in one place: Swarming has a
When I think of POs and the team, I think of learning in several loops: The PO learns when the team finishes small features or creates a prototype so the PO can see what the team is thinking/delivering. The team learns more about its process and what the PO wants. If the Product Manager sees
I like to be efficient. I like finishing my work quickly, without wasting time, money, or energy. But it’s also important to be effective—working on what matters most. One of the legacies of waterfall approaches is that too often, our focus is on efficiency and not effectiveness. Efficiency is how fast you can do something.