Many of my middle-management and senior leadership clients want certainty about future work. That’s one of the reasons they create huge backlogs and long roadmaps. Yet, even those backlogs and roadmaps don’t offer certainty. One of these managers said, “I have so much uncertainty and ambiguity. I feel as if I can’t make a good, […]
I started this series with the issues of trying to estimate/predict a specific backlog item quarters away, not even weeks away. (Even weeks away is iffy because the entropy is the default state for the world.) In Part 1, I suggested that the team can use cycle time, but even with cycle time, we need
In How to Predict When the Team Will Complete a Specific Backlog Item, Part 1, I said there was no way to accurately predict an estimate for a specific backlog item more than a month away. I did suggest several options if you want to go through the motions, but there’s no accurate answer to
Your team has one of those long roadmaps or a long backlog. They’re working, delivering about two items (full stories) a week. Then, your manager asks you this question: “That feature set in six months: when will you start it and when will you finish it?” “We could start it now,” you say, “assuming we
When I published Writing Secret 9: Keep Your Writing Clean As You Write, the feedback surprised me. Many of my fellow nonfiction writers write a lot before they get internal feedback. That might be right for them. It’s not right for me. I finally understood why I write differently. I think of each iteration as
Do your senior leaders want more predictability about when your team can finish its work? Perfect prediction is impossible, and sometimes, even reasonable prediction is quite difficult (with apologies to Yogi Berra). However, agile teams have one specific “tool” to create better predictability: right-sizing their stories. When a team right-sizes their work, they can create