A colleague recently asked me how a team can deliver something useful in the next four to five weeks. “That’s all? Just four to five weeks?” I asked. Yes, that was all the time they had remaining. They’d worked on this product for a while, but that was the time they had left. This problem […]
I recently learned that the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada has closed all of its retail stores. This is a big deal, because they’d been in business since 1670. But it’s an even bigger deal for risk management. That’s because the Company pioneered the use of the “Hudson’s Bay Start.” That’s where they encouraged the
When I wrote Manage It!, I included an idea called a Hudson Bay Start. I wrote an article about that later, in How to Use Iteration Zero—Or Not. Hudson Bay Starts are not a new idea. However, you might not know what they are. Here’s the idea: the team chooses one item from their backlog.
Do you use Iteration Zero for your agile projects? An Iteration Zero is an iteration where you set up all the servers, make sure you have a release plan, develop a product backlog, and in general do all those things that “assure” you that your project is ready to go. Some agile project managers do,