agile

Syllabus

Practical Product Owner Workshop: Deliver What Your Customers Value and Need

I no longer offer this workshop. Please see Practical Product Leadership: Deliver Better and Faster with Continual Replanning Workshop for the updated syllabus. Does this describe your product ownership predicament: You are supposed to be the product manager, product owner, and business analyst. You might even juggle different responsibilities for multiple teams. You struggle to read

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What Do You Believe?

I meet many people who are convinced there is One Way to Do Agile. Oh, and it’s the way they are using the agile practices. In their opinion, everyone should do agile their way. They believe that the kanban board is more valuable than a Scrum board—or the other way around. They believe that as

agile, MPD

How Long Are Your Iterations? Part 2

When I teach agile, I explain I like small and short stories. I want to see value in the product every day. Many developers can’t do that. That’s because they have interdependencies with other teams—not developers on their team, but other teams. They can’t implement in the way the picture next to this shows: small,

agile, MPD

How Long Are Your Iterations? Part 1

I spoke with a Scrum Master the other day. He was concerned that the team didn’t finish their work in one 2-week iteration. He was thinking of making the iterations three weeks. I asked what happened in each iteration. Who wrote the stories and when, when did the developers finish what, and when did the testers

MPD, project management

Creating Great Estimates as a Team

I’ve been teaching workshops these last few weeks. A number of the participants think that they need to create great estimates. I keep hearing, “I have to create accurate estimates. My team needs my estimate to be accurate.” I have found that the smaller the work, the better the estimate. If people work as a team,

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Making Time for Reflection

How often do you reflect on your career or life? If you are like me, it’s easy to let the daily pushes and pulls distract you from reflection. I realized about a year ago I had not reflected purposefully about my work and my life in a couple of years. I reflect on consulting, individual

MPD, product ownership

The Product Roadmap is Not the Project Portfolio

I keep seeing talks and arguments about how the portfolio team should manage the epics for a program. That conflates the issue of project portfolio management and product management. Several potential teams affect each project (or program). Starting at the right side of this image, the project portfolio team decides which projects to do and

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What Are You Measuring?

I see people measure all kinds of things in projects. Too often, they are single-point or single-dimension measurements. Those measurements don’t provide you with a good idea about the health of your project. They might be a start. However, they are insufficient. Imagine you, like me, would like to lose some weight. You weigh yourself

conference, MPD

My Agile 2015 Roundup

Agile 2015 was the week of Aug 3-7 this year. It was a great week. Here are the links to my interviews and talks. Interview with Dave Prior. We spoke about agile programs, continuous planning, and how you might use certifications. I made a little joke about measurement. Interview with Paul DuPuy of SolutionsIQ. We

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