I’m doing a Twitter chat November 3 at 4pm Eastern/8pm UK with David Daly. David posted the video of our conversation as prep for the Twitter chat. Today he tweeted this: “How do you optimize for features? That’s flow efficiency.” Yes, I said that. There were several Twitter rants about the use of the word […]
If you’ve been watching my writing (and speaking), you’ve noticed that I like both agile and lean. I like the cadence of milestones and demos that iteration-based agile provides. I like the limiting of work in progress and seeing the whole that lean provides. For me, both are necessary to deliver value. You might have
I am very happy to announce that Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition is out! This edition has these additions from the first edition: A chapter on scaling. How do you move from a team or a couple of groups’ portfolio to the entire organization? Updated chapter on
An agile coach asked me this question, “What tool should our senior leadership use for managing the program/portfolio?” That question told me these things: Her leadership is confused about the difference between a program (one business deliverable composed of many projects) and the project portfolio (a picture of the committed work that implements the organizational
I was at an experience report at Agile 2016 last week, Scaling Without Frameworks-Ultimate Experience Report. One of the authors, Daniel Vacanti said this: Flow focuses on unblocking work. Iterations (too often) focus on the person doing the work. At the time, I did not know Daniel’s twitter handle. I now do. Sorry for not
In Part 1, I talked about small stories/chunks of work, checking in all the time so you could build often and see progress. That assumes you know what done means. Project “done” means release criteria. Here are some stories about how I started using release criteria. Back in the 70s, I worked in a small development group.
Would you like to release your product at any time? I like it when releases are a business decision, not a result of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s possible, and it might not be easy for you. Here are some stories that showed you how I did it, long ago and more recently. Story 1: Many years
(I updated this post in May 2025 to more carefully describe what I mean by collaboration and how that differs from cooperation. I struck through collaboration when I meant cooperation.) A colleague asked mobbing last week on Twitter. Here’s the short answer, including pairing so you can see everything in one place: Swarming has a
When I think of POs and the team, I think of learning in several loops: The PO learns when the team finishes small features or creates a prototype so the PO can see what the team is thinking/delivering. The team learns more about its process and what the PO wants. If the Product Manager sees
Part 1 was about how the PO needs to see the big picture and develop the ranked backlog. Part 2 was about the learning that arises from small stories. This part is about ranking. If you specify deliverables in your big picture and small picture roadmaps, you have already done a gross form of ranking. You