Three Secrets to Creating Your Focus Time I don’t like multitasking at all. And, I have many projects in progress. How is it possible to jump from one project to another—and not forget where I am? My secret is focus time—small periods of time where I focus-and-finish work. Secret 1: Write down the work you […]
See Your Agile Collaboration Traps In honor of the impending Create Your Successful Agile Project book release, I decided to send you a four-part series about agile traps. Yes, one for each piece of the subtitle. This one is the collaboration trap. Here are three common collaboration traps: Your team is a component team. (The
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
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
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
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
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
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