So in prior posts about IT Strategy (The Goal of IT, Enterprise Application Value) I have talked about IT’s “Outward Facing Strategy”. So this post will be more about what are we doing to help ourselves deliver against our outward facing strategy.
At the top level of our Internal IT Strategy is our values: What we believe is important. What we value is the essence of our belief system.Continue Reading
A recent exercise at the job around improving the accuracy of estimate for software delivery projects caused me to have a minor epiphany!
When doing agile software delivery, we generally get value from having more information sooner. But this plays differently in managing the backlog.
We have been working on writing basic stories for all the ideas in our backlog, and producing T-Shirt size + Confidence estimates on each story. The challenge, is to scope a release and commit to a schedule with greater precision. Our customer (and management) would like us to estimate with greater precision, to match the estimates that are performed at each stage-gate in our non-agile software delivery life cycle.
The problem is, that our backlog (“Chinese menu”) estimates do not contemplate the state of the code base at the beginning of the release. We do this intentionally, so that the customer (product owner) can move stories backward and forward in the sequence without considering any cost or schedule optimization that could be had if we delivered in some sequence other than VALUE OPTIMAL.Continue Reading