Group items tagged

Institute an agile transition team, and have the agile PMO play a significant role on that team. If you are starting on the journey, establishing an agile transition team can be a critical factor in your success. The agile transition team plans and implements the strategy for the organization’s agile transition (using a backlog, iterations, planning meetings, retrospectives and, in general, responding to change) This group monitors and communicates results throughout the organization, and is responsible for removing organizational level impediments. The PMO representative can act as ScrumMaster for the agile transition team. Members should be leaders representing different departments and functions that are impacted by the agile transition. For example, having leaders from development, QA, product development and the PMO is an excellent practice.

Establish a “Meta Scrum” that is tasked with mapping projects and features to corporate strategy. As part of optimizing the whole, it is important for there to be a big picture view across products and features. In general, product managers are tasked with defining, prioritizing and communicating the vision and features for their products. When you have a program that encompasses multiple products with multiple product owners and project teams, keeping everything in line with the corporate vision can sometimes be overlooked.   Unlike the Scrum of Scrums--which is tactical, i.e. focused on execution--the Meta Scrum is focused on the strategic planning and decisions guiding the program or programs as a whole. Establishing a Meta Scrum with the PMO representative acting as ScrumMaster to plan and facilitate meetings (as well as reporting and tracking decisions and action items) can add significant value in having a program able to rapidly respond to change while staying true to the corporate strategy and objectives.

I like using story points to establish the velocity of individual teams. From a program point of view, however, story points are difficult to use across multiple teams. The nut there is that one team’s story point is not equivalent to another team’s story point. To crack that nut, I use agileEVM to “normalize” to standard project management metrics like the Cost Performance Index and the Schedule Performance Index, as well as the Estimate At Complete in integrated dollars. These metrics can be aggregated across teams to establish progress against the plan for the entire program.

It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.

It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.

Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.

team that had some problems getting their process right

their velocity was decreasing and spirits were low. Luckily we managed to change our process by changing some basic Scrum practices and replacing some of them with Lean practices, inspired by the new Kanban articles and presentations. Productivity is now higher than ever and we can now focus on what really matters: product quality and customer satisfaction.

one major issue: getting things done. The major symptom was the frustration of management and the team with the project. The first 3-week time box (sprint) ending with about 30% (!) of all features still in progress, when, of course, they should all have been done and ready for shipment.

The Roadmap consists of a series of planned release dates, each of which has a theme and a prioritized feature set.

While it is a simple thing mechanically to represent the Roadmap, figuring out the content for anything beyond the next release is another matter entirely. The topic of what else the team plans to ship and when can be a fascinating and contentious topic in agile

the easiest way to think about the Roadmap is that it is an output, rather than an input to the Release Planning process.

Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.

Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.

Bob Martin’s idea Bob Martin of Object Mentor posted an interesting variant to get around this problem: a base fee per story point, plus a lower-than-usual (close-to or below cost) fee per hour. This biases the contracted company’s to deliver early, but gives them some protection in case work proceeds slower than expected. Bob Martin described it this way:”[A]gree to pay a certain amount for each point completed, plus a certain amount for each hour worked. For example, let’s say you’ve got a project of 1000 points. Let’s also say that a team of four has established an estimated velocity of 50 points per week. This looks like about an 80 man-week job. At $100/hour this would be a $320,000 job. So lets reduce the hourly rate to $30/hour, and ask the customer for $224 per point. This sets up a very interesting dynamic. If the job really does take 80 man-weeks, then it will cost the same. If it takes 100 man-weeks then it will cost $344,000. If it takes 70 man-weeks it will cost $308,000. Notice that this is a small difference for a significant amount of time. Notice also that you, as developer feel strong motivation to be done early, since that increases your true hourly rate.” I have not seen that model in action myself, but several people have written in recommending it.

To determine the truth of this we only need to look at the feature sets of the popular tools for managing eXtreme Programming and Scrum such as Rally, VersionOne, ScrumWorks, Mingle and very new tools like Borland Team Focus, to discover that not a single one of these tools allows you to set an explicit WIP limit. None of them provide a pull signal to start new work. Very few of them are even capable of reporting the quantity of work-in-progress.

s we learned more about the value of managing WIP, we introduced concepts to encourage and enable it, such as the use of Cumulative Flow Diagrams (a.k.a. Burn Up charts)

Agile teams encountering an impediment would generally mark a story as blocked and go on to another one

Simply using iterations, user stories and velocity doesn’t mean your project is agile – or on the way to success.

why “iterations” may be hazardous to your project: ‘’Danger grows when the results of the iteration are not directly linked to delivering the product to the end user.’’ Without that linkage, iteration results hang in the air

What gets in the way is that the project is set up as a pipeline, with programming put somewhere in the middle of the pipeline. In this project setup, there is really nothing the programmers can do to show how their work connects to deliveries, because there are work stations before and after theirs. All they can report is that “some new code is integrated into the code base.” They are doing incremental development but not agile development.

*Please note that I'm specifically talking about productivity. Velocity is a great tool for estimating and planning and I'm not trying to change that. It's just not a good measure of productivity.

rather than asking your business experts to measure business value after delivery (difficult!), have them estimate it beforehand. Every story (or feature--keep reading) gets an estimate before it's scheduled. At the end of each iteration, add up the value estimates for the stories you completed in that iteration. This is your "value velocity."

And rather than reflecting the hours programmers work, as cost velocity does, value velocity actually reflects productivity. Remember, productivity equals output/time. Value estimates are a much better indication of output than cost estimates are.