Your customers can’t take your product more often than once or twice a year. Because the product doesn’t need to leave the building, the teams don’t release internally. Nor do the teams demo on a regular basis. The teams miss the feedback loops so critical for an agile approach. Their agile transformation falls apart. Rethink Your Definition […]
See Your Agile Delivery Traps Does your team deliver what they want, when they want to? Maybe your team delivers, but depends on another team to deploy. Many teams have trouble delivering the value they so carefully create. Here are three delivery traps I’ve seen in agile teams: The team doesn’t have “done” criteria. The
Create an Environment of Delivery One of the nice things about agile and lean approaches is that they focus on delivering value. I’m a huge fan of delivering value. The larger and longer your project or program, the more delivering value is important. That’s because your organization is investing in your project or program. They
When you’re a project manager for a traditional project, it’s easy to write a project charter. You can sit in your office and write it alone, if necessary. You don’t have to involve the team. On an agile project, is that the right thing to do? Should you even use the same template? Agile projects
Do you know about the Cost of Delay? It’s the way to think about the revenue you can lose plus the cost of continued development. One of my managers many years ago had a back of the napkin approach to cost of delay. “Johanna, we want to ship this product in the second quarter this
Knowing When an Agile Project is Done I meet a number of new-to-agile folks who worry that an agile project might never be done. They use air quotes around the word “project” when they refer to agile projects. Just beause you use iterations or kanban for an agile project doesn’t mean it doesn’t have release
Why a Project Charter Works Do you know what the vision of your project is—the goal of your project? You might know your iteration’s goal. You might know what each feature needs. But do you know the goal for your project? There are two necessary pieces of information in a project charter: the vision and
Now that the election is over, we have an opportunity to reflect on some of the project management and hiring practices. I’m going to blog here and over at Hiring Technical People because the bits are just too juicy to leave untouched. If you read nothing else, read Inside Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed
I’m in Las Vegas waiting to get on a plan to Los Angeles to go to New Zealand for SDC. I led a workshop yesterday for real estate project managers about how to define success and manage some of the early-in-the-project risks. We discussed issues such as the Hudson Bay start, context-free questions, release criteria,
Last week at Agile 2010, Joshua Kerievsky and I facilitated an Open Jam session (open space) about what done means. We discussed a variety of points. I believe we eventually agreed that context matters. It’s important to know what your product success criteria are. If you don’t use a project charter where you define success