Johanna Rothman, Management Consultant
Expert in Managing Product Development
Let me summarize what I’ve been talking about in these posts. The problem I’m seeing is that too many teams and organizations plan too much in too much detail too soon. Instead of architectural BDUF (Big Design Up Front), it’s project planning as BDUF. They expect one single person (a product manager or a product …
Continue reading “Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 7, Summary”
You’ve started thinking in feature sets. Maybe you’ve experimented with rolling wave plans inside one quarter, so you can change and replan as you need to support your project or program. You’ve discussed flow-based roadmapping as a way to create MVPs and MVEs, release smaller value more often so you can make better decisions. You …
Continue reading “Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 6, Managers Want Commitments”
If you need to plan more often than once a quarter, how do you know how to replan? Instead of incurring the time and cost when you bring everyone together, consider the Product Value Team. (In past writing and presentations, I’ve called this the Product Owner Value Team. I am trying to change my term …
Continue reading “Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 5, the Product Value Team”
One of my clients was trying—valiantly—to make their quarterly planning sessions work. They prepared, getting the big hotel room. They had plenty of supplies. The planning even went well. However, within two weeks, their plan had no relation to reality. That meant that for the next ten weeks, the product owners were “on their own.” …
In Part 1, I wrote about thinking in feature sets so everyone could see smaller chunks of work. (If you can see them, you might be able to plan for smaller and deliver smaller.) In Part 2, I suggested smaller rolling waves than an entire quarter (two months, or preferably one month) so people could …
Continue reading “Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 3, Flow-Based Roadmapping”
In Part 1, I wrote about thinking in feature sets and how to quickly create a feature set of—with any luck—smaller features. That’s because features don’t arrive at the same rate and they change in value, during a quarter. Because features change in value and because some feature sets need to deliver value on a more regular …
Many teams and organizations try to create one-quarter roadmaps. Here are the problems I see: Teams spend a ton of time estimating what they might do and then they select what will fit into a quarter. They feel or are asked to commit to all that work. The product managers and project portfolio managers depend on …
Continue reading “Alternatives for Agile and Lean Roadmapping: Part 1, Think in Feature Sets”
Several years ago, I wrote a post for a different blog called “Why Team Size Matters.” That post is long gone. I explained that the number of communication paths in the team does not increase linearly as the team size increases; team communication paths square when the team increases linearly. Here is the calculation where N is …
Many people use an iteration approach to agile. They decide on an iteration duration, commit to work for that iteration and by definition, they are done at the end of the timebox. I like timeboxing many things. I like timeboxing work I don’t know how to start. I find short timeboxes help me focus on the …
As I’m writing the agile project management book, I’m explaining how agile creates and manages WIP (Work in Progress) Limits. Iteration-based agile manages WIP by estimating what you can do in an iteration. You might count points. Or, you use my preference, which is to count the (small) stories. If you use flow-based approaches, you use …