I was asked by a corporate Programme Management Office (PMO) to provide a glossary definition for “Agile”. This is the definition I gave them.
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Author Archives: Steven Thomas
Using a Product Led Matrix in Lean-Agile
I’ve worked in a variety of organisational settings including matrixed and non-matrixed. Based on this experience I thought I’d write up a few observations about organisational structures.
Traditionally companies have been organised into functional teams. More recently, partly as a result of Scrum and Lean for Software Engineering, companies are moving to departments containing cross functional product teams. Some organisations have a mix, for example, design might be a functional department but other departments might contain product teams. Other companies try to combine function and product into a explicit matrix structure. This ensures both product and function are represented on the management team.
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Minimum Releasable Feature
There are a variety of terms in use for chunks of functionality that are worth releasing and the requirements that describe them. Desirable characteristics for these features include being minimum, releasable, and valuable. At the moment I am using the phrase Minimum Releasable Feature (MRF) so I thought I’d explain why and some of the alternatives.
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Two Pillars of the Lean Thinking House
The Toyota approach to lean is quite sophisticated and is based on a model called the Lean Thinking House (Larman & Vodde, 2009). The Toyota model includes two pillars:
- Respect for People
- Continuous Improvement
These pillars struck a cord with me. I’m normally more interested in what practices work than in values and principles however these two phrases seemed to nicely summarise my approach to work and are key themes in my career.
References
Larman, C., and Vodde, B. (2009). Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum. Addison-Wesley.
Difference between programme, project, portfolio and product management
P3M stands for "programme, portfolio and project management". Product management is a closely related discipline and as most software organisations do product development I’ll include it in the discussion.
P3M Levels:
programme, project, portfolio
and product management
That bit is simple. The tricky bit is agreeing what a project, product, portfolio or programme is. Projects and products are pretty straight forward but definitions vary quite a lot for programme and portfolio. A portfolio for some people is a set of products where for others it is a group of projects. I have, for example, met a portfolio manager who was responsible for some projects and within the same division met a another portfolio manager who was responsible for the product portfolio of the entire division. Programmes are sometimes seen as simply as a complex project or set of projects, or, more interestingly, as an initiative to deliver business benefit.
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Scale and Performance Suggestions for High Usage Websites
I work at the BBC and scale and performance is a big deal. After talking to Mark Gledhill (one of the Senior Software Engineers) and Andy Macinnes (head of ops) I put together some notes on scale and performance. It isn’t rocket science; just good common sense.
The general message is to avoid unnecessary repetition. If you’re a scalability/performance problem then you could explore …
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Agile Quality Management
Quality Management, in a project context, is concerned with having the right processes to ensure both quality product and a quality project. This article describes Traditional Quality Management, Agile versus Traditional Quality Management, Agile Product Quality, Agile Project Quality, Agile Product Quality, Agile Quality Assurance and Control, and Agile Quality Improvement.
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Agile Project Estimating
Estimates are an essential part of Agile Project Planning. Software estimation has always been problematic and people have proposed many different ways to do estimating. Different methods are on a spectrum from formal to informal and from supposedly objective to seemingly subjective. Different methods also get individuals estimate or groups. And some methods estimate size and derive effort while others estimate effort directly. Estimating in the Agile world has settled a certain approach which might be characterised as expert group estimation of size. this article covers Traditional Project Estimation, Agile versus Traditional Estimating, Estimating User Stories, Estimating Tasks, Contingency, and Agile Ballpark Estimates.
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Agile Project Execution
Executing is one of the five project management process groups in the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute (2004).
Project Execution is where you build the project deliverables and hand them over to your customer, i.e. where you build and deliver the software. This is where most of the project effort is invested. Agile Project Planning says what you intend to do, when, and Agile Monitoring & Control helps you stay on track but Agile Project Execution is where you do the business.
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Agile Project Monitoring and Control
No battle plan survives contact with the enemy
Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke
Life is what happens to you
while you’re busy making other plans
John Lennon
Agile Project Planning tells us what we expect to do, but, to paraphrase the quotes above, plans often turn to custard. The job of the Agile Project Manager is to guide the team to successful delivery despite the challenges the world throws at the project. This article is about monitoring the project against the plan and intervening when we notice things going off track. In particular it covers Traditional Project Monitoring & Control, Agile versus Traditional Monitoring & Control, Agile Project control, Agile project metrics, Agile Project Reporting, and Agile Project Monitoring.
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