What makes a product owner excellent? Is it subject matter or domain knowledge? Is it discipline around following the rules of the delivery management practice? Is it ability to elicit value propositions from or to sell value propositions to stakeholders? In my last post ProductOwnerTraining – I listed out a set of core activities that…
Product Owner Training
How do you develop the mindset and skills needed to be a successful software product owner? In a technology organization, (software vendor, tech startup) product owners tend to come out of a technology background. They are ex-developers, ex-architects and sometimes ex-sales engineers. In a non-technology enterprise (a normal company) the product owner is more likely…
A Definition of Done
In his Herding Cats blog, Glen Alleman, asks a very pertinent question. What is the definition of done? Well? Done (Enterprise software delivery project) – when software capabilities have been delivered that support the business value proposition per the customer’s business capability requirements. In our agility, we recognize that requirements are clarified by “emerging information”.…
Enough (as a damping mechanism)
In a recent post, Esther Derby describes a tendency of organizations towards oscillating between centralized or decentralized controls – I thought it was a brilliant insight in that she exposed that at the extreme reaches of the pendulum in either direction, there are evidence of lower performance, but for different causes. I have experienced this…
Agile Estimation Sanity
Some of the things I read about estimation in the agile community appear to me to be insane. Story points and the reasons that they are the preferable unit of estimate is one of those things. Before you call me a heretic, and burn me at the stake for my blasphemy, and my castigating your…
Agile Versus Whatever
In a number of posts over the last few months, Glen Alleman (Herding Cats) has been saying that Agile comparisons to “waterfall” or “predictive” are bogus, because the practices that they compare themselves to are simply BAD practices or anti-patterns in the domain of project management. While I don’t disagree with Glen in the slightest,…
Agile Risk Mitigation
Before we talk about whether agile practices provide any benefits toward risk mitigation or risk reduction, we really need to talk about the nature of risk in a software development project or process. In any discussion of risks, there are any number of attritbutes by which we can classify or characterize risks, but in order…
Agile Value Delivery
Agile practices claim to delivery greater value to the customer. This claim is based on agile tendencies to deliver software capabilities more frequently, which in and of itself, means that the customer starts realizing value from our efforts sooner. OK – this one is obvious. Traditional phase gated life cycles effectively require you to do…
Agile Predictability
Predictability is probably the least hyped benefit of agile practices. It is not sexy or fun, nor does the team gain from it, in a positive way. But the team does benefit from it, from a management perspective. The benefit of a predictable software delivery process is realized in three ways: Rational Planning Process –…
Agile Productivity
One of the hyped benefits of agile software development practices is increased productivity. It is also the benefit that I am most skeptical of. Software productivity is notoriously difficult to measure. That is because there are no relatively standard units of measurement of output. Martin Fowler said this in 2003, and as far as I…