- Outside the Product Owner and the implementation team, senior stakeholders may require milestones articulating deliverables.
- Epics or Themes, high-level declaration of the “Release” essence, rolls up from Features, and Product Backlog Items (PBI). Relative effort estimations may be applied at the PBI level, and then rolled up to calculate/guestimate the duration of Epics.
- Look toward SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) to change the culture by providing an opportunity for the entire organization to participate in the Agile process. “Product Increments” present windows of opportunity every 8 to 10 weeks.
- Product Increments may involve multiple scrum teams, their scope, and how these teams may intersect. In order to synchronize these Scrum Teams, SAFe introduces Agile Release Trains (ART), and Release Train Engineers (RTE) to coordinate cadence of the scrum teams to be in alignment with Epic and Feature deliverables.
- Stakeholders may require a “waterfall” plan to understand delivery timeframes for milestone artifact deliverables. For example, “When do we deliver in the plan? We have dependencies on XYZ to build upon and integrate”
- External teams may have dependencies on artifacts delivered in the plan thus cross scrum team interaction is critical, sometimes through a reoccurring ceremony “Scrum of Scrums“.
- Additional transparency into the scrum team or the “Circle of Trust” can be provided through the use of Dashboards. Dashboards may contain widgets that produce real-time views into the current initiative. Key Project Indicators (KPIs), metrics being monitored to determine the success of Product ABC Epic Phase completion.
- Dashboards may include: Average Team Velocity, Burn Down, Burn Up, Bug Status by Severity, and metrics that are initiative focused, e.g. N out of Y BI Reports have been completed.
Tag Archives: SAFe
Agile Manifesto – Personal Reflection
Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools
Stereotypical software developers are introverts, heads down, coding. Articulating where they are in the development lifecycle sometimes heavily relies upon tools for measuring progress such as JIRA, Product Backlog status of User Stories, e.g. “In Progress” with an Effort estimation of 3.
“Blocked” User Stories may require the implementation team to “break out of their shell” and work with their teammates to “unblock” Product Backlog items. It breaks people out of their comfort zone. We need to discuss options and opportunities for removing blockers. “All for One, and One for all”
Working Product over Comprehensive Documentation
Over a decade or so ago, the measure of my merit was the complete test coverage of requirements for software implementation. Back then I was a QA lead, and my focus was to make sure all use cases for the software under development had complete test coverage.
Requirements changes from our business through our business analysts must be vetted with the QA team so use cases/test cases must be updated to ensure coverage. Sometimes a dependency of one requirement had a ripple effect throughout the software, so lots of documentation updates were required. Milestone dates were in many cases fixed, so teams were squeezed to do more with less time.
Flash forward to today, and leveraging Agile principles, I breathe a slight sigh of relief. Iterating product delivery via sprints every 2 weeks is supremely better than attempting to traverse updates to Business Requirements Documents (BRD), and technical specs. User Stories in a Backlog are much more succinct, and in some cases, a bit more abstract leaving functionality open to some level of ambiguity and interpretation.
Sprint Close scrum ceremonies every two weeks with our Product Owner, the central mouthpiece for the definition of the software product helps define the path forward. Did we get it right? Where do we need to make changes? There is no substitute for an evolving product and accompanying dialog with our Product Owner.
Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation
Both sides of the aisle seem to agree, building a solution with iterative input from the customer enables the product vision to be realized far better than without frequent touchpoints.
Statements of Work (SoW) to engage 3rd party solutions integrators (SI) may be abstract in some way. Holding vendors accountable for loosely formed requirements is tenuous at best. Quibbling about he said, she said is a waste of time.
Fail fast, engage regularly and often with our [Business] Product Owner enables us to collaborate on a working solution. The focus is on the evolving product vision and not the paper trail.
Responding to Change over Following a Plan
A “last-minute” change request? It could push back our timelines and accompanying milestones. Dates can’t change, and teams need to absorb the changes, i.e. nights and weekends. Responding to incremental changes at a regular cadence is a sustainable life cycle.
Continuing Certification Requirements for Project Management Professional (PMP)
The years seem to have flown by, and it’s that time again to complete my Continuing Certification Requirements for my PMP cert.
I randomly searched the web for PMP courses, then found myself back at PMI.org “Searching Activities”. Seems like the easiest way to lookup activities because they define the activities, and the correlated list of Professional Development Units, categorized by:
- Technical
- Leadership
- Strategic & Business
Based on the activities I’ve already completed, my majority of work has been accomplished in the Technical category. I need to focus on attaining Leadership and Strategic & Business categories.
Here are a few activities I thought were interesting, and took each one of these Online or Digital Media courses. Pluralsight provides an excellent set of courses at a relatively low price. I highly recommend Pluralsight for your learning needs. I also took a few of the LinkedIn courses and found it to be an excellent learning platform with a wide array of courses that can be applied as PDU credits.
Customizing Your Team Workflow with the Best of Kanban and Scrum
If you have doubts choosing which methodology to use, this course will give you a comparison of Kanban and Scrum, making your choice easier. By watching this course you will learn how to take the best of both, Scrum and Kanban, and how to make a winning combination for your team and project.
Leadership: 1.25
Crisis Communication and Technology: Communicating with Colleagues
Crisis communication is one of the most challenging communication types an organization or individual can face, bringing together emotional vulnerability, ethical challenges, and high-stakes decisions amplified by informational and persuasive goals. When managed well, this communication can neutralize and calm an evolving crisis. When managed poorly, though, crisis communication makes a situation worse. This course takes viewers through the most important parts of preparing for crisis communication, including understanding crisis types and strategies, preparing foundational documents, and how to create communication in the moment. By the end of the course, viewers will have a concrete understanding of how to manage crisis communication for their own organizations, providing invaluable insight and immediate benefit.
Leadership: 1.50
Scrum Master Fundamentals – Growing Yourself and Your Team
Are you a Scrum Master ready to advance your craft? This course will teach you specific strategies for coaching each member of your team and show you how to build on your experience as a Scrum Master to advance your own career to the next level.
Leadership: 1.25
Product Owner Fundamentals – Foundations of Product Ownership
Did you know that one of the most common reasons Scrum Teams fail is the lack of a skilled Product Owner? If you’ve suddenly found yourself in this role, this course will teach you how you can use the role to help your team deliver a great product.
Technical: 0.75 Strategic & Business: 0.50
PMI-ACP®: Value-driven Delivery and Adaptive Planning (3 of 11)
This course will provide an in-depth understanding of Agile adaptive planning and value-driven delivery practices, requirements definition practices, as well as principles and practices related to stakeholder management. This course is part of the PMI-ACP Agile Project Management series.
Technical: 0.75 Strategic & Business: 1.75
Design Thinking: Lead Change in your Organization
Design thinking is a user-centered way of solving problems. It involves extensive collaboration, using strategies such as mapping customer journeys, concept creation, and prototyping. This course teaches leaders how to help their teams adopt a design thinking mindset, and provides examples from author Turi McKinley’s work at frog, a global design and strategy firm that transforms businesses at scale by creating systems of brand, product, and service.
Leadership: 2.00
Organizational Change Management for the ITIL® Practitioner
Organizational change management is as essential skill for all leaders. This course will teach you how to successfully navigate the people side of change.
Leadership: 1.50
