Summary: Too often, customers have a “fake certainty” about the problems they want to solve. They might not have defined the real problem, but they have frequently defined the solution anyway. The risk is that we might build the wrong thing. When the product owner works with the customers to define the problem, then works […]
Many organizations plan to create certainty, guarantees of some variety. What if we thought about agile planning as a way to manage uncertainty? When I look at long roadmaps with all the “must-do” feature sets and the pressure managers put on teams to commit to delivery, I wonder about this question: How well do we
One of my clients has many reasons for wanting an agile transformation. Their old products are at the end of their lives. They need agile approaches so they can get feedback from customers as they develop the new products. They need to deliver to their customers more often. They need to create a mix of
Part of what makes an agile transformation difficult is the cultural change required. That’s what makes an agile transformation a journey. A client said to me, “I want the agile. The agile is good stuff: faster delivery of smaller stuff that we can get revenue for. I want it now. How fast can I get
I’ve been thinking more about possible measurements in an agile transformation journey. The first Possible Measurements post focuses on product throughput measurements. This post will focus on measurements you might see when the culture changes with an agile transformation. Again, do start with your why. Without knowing why you want to use agile approaches throughout the organization,
“What should I measure???” is one of the questions I see when I work with people going through an agile transformation. Too often, managers measure people as individuals. (Traditional measurements focus on resource efficiency instead of flow efficiency.) Resource efficiency measures don’t measure what the organization delivers or what prevents the organization from delivering. This
If you read my scaling agile series, you can see that becoming an agile organization requires seeing your organization as a system with a culture. You can start with teams, move to programs and the product part of the organization. If you don’t also address the cultural problems of rewards, you won’t continue with your
Agile culture is about the ability to change. (You need to know why you want to change, but once you know that, agile cultures promote change.) We (as agile teams and organizations) deliver something to get some feedback and learning. We use that feedback and learning about what we just did to challenge our assumptions
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
Productive Vs. Busy I received some fascinating responses to Do You Want More Productivity? One correspondent told me that managers need to move people—especially testers—from one project where they are not busy to another project where they could help. His experience matches mine—many projects do not have enough testers. However, we do not share the