SAFe Agile Tip: Using VersionOne's Communities and Topics to show Team Program Objectives

Using the VersionOne Communities and Topics to present team objectives is a fast and efficient way clearly display your Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) Team Program Increment (PI) objectives.  Integrated into the TeamRoom™ via the Topics panel, the VersionOne TeamRoom topic conversations also allow your suppliers and customers to communicate and discuss the objectives and status of different PI’s.  This can be done as a member of the team, or as a guest collaborator via an email address. Keep Reading....

MBA058: Reusable Discovery Testing

Check out Dave Saboe's Podcast and let me know what you think about Reusable Discovery Testing...

MBA058: Reusable Discovery Testing

Reusable Discovery Testing

Imagine being able to have a thorough understanding of your customer’s needs and wants even before you begin a project and having a repository of tested requirements from which to pull.  Reusable discovery testing may allow you to reduce the time needed to elicit requirements by up to 60% by identifying new channels for collecting information, capturing the results of discussions with stakeholders, and reusing information.  

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VersionOne unveils its Winter 2016 release

The agile life-cycle management solution provider VersionOne is looking to give users even more visibility into their projects with its latest release. The company announced its Winter 2016 release comes with a new feature, the VersionOne Continuum, that aims to extend visibility across the entire life cycle from portfolio planning to Continuous Delivery.

Read more: http://sdtimes.com/the-worst-passwords-of-2015-versionone-unveils-its-winter-2016-release-and-learning-about-deep-learning-from-google-sd-times-digest-jan-21-2016/#ixzz3yGWDONsg 

Done is better than PERFECT

Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

Perfect is the enemy of the done; especially when thinking about the Agile Manifesto.  If perfection is your goal you have a narrow margin for error.

The goal is to make sure you add value to your customers and that the software you produce is helping.  Making progress a little bit at at time can be extremely valuable.

Work to foster the correct type of relationship with your customers to understand that some incremental improvement, will lead to more and more successes.  Plus the lessons learned from that experience will dramatically improve the product over time.

Reduce risk by delivering smaller batches, not by adding so much process that you are unable to deliver anything.  Big bang deployments put all your eggs in one basked.

While they are necessary and there is a place and time for them, I'd rather encourage my teams to spread the risk and the value and improve one step at a time.

VersionOne and Scaled Agile Align on Support for SAFe® 4.0

ATLANTA – January 7, 2016 – VersionOne, the independent leader in agile lifecycle management solutions, today announced support for Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) 4.0 for Lean Software and Systems Engineering. SAFe 4.0 includes a new Value Stream Level for handling the needs of large software and complex systems developments with hundreds or more developers per value stream. VersionOne’s deep enterprise-level capabilities, which include Enterprise Kanban and end-to-end visibility from portfolio planning to customer delivery, allows the world’s largest software organizations to scale their agile practices using the SAFe 4.0 framework. Keep Reading...

People Working Together

Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

Great things happen when you can get people working together.  It is a VALUE MULTIPLIER that can help you see tremendous results.

Some of the benefits include:

• Increased Trust
• Better Transparency
• Ability to have healthy conflict
• Positive impact on team and organizational culture 

If you are not working together with your business partners on a daily basis, give it a try and measure the positive results.

Guardrails for Backlog Items - 7 Things Every Story Should Use

People ask us all the time “What are the must use fields that every team should use?” While this is the ultimate “It Depends” answer, I have found that setting a few key guardrails across the entire project team enterprise will give you the best possible chance for decision making, accelerating delivery, and ensuring alignment from the Board Room to the TeamRoom™.

Here are the seven things that help any companies product backlog become a strategic alignment machine.

1. REAL RELEASES – Every backlog item must be linked to a Project Asset (e.g. Release). Why not make the release meaningful, and consistent? It’s very easy to see when the Quick Status Check story will be delivered and when if the release is named “11.30.15 – Release 1.0”. In my Scrum Master world, no story is committed to production without being tied in the Org Level hierarchy to a date-based release. Try to keep your project levels as lean a possible.
2. PORTFOLIO ITEM – All backlog items should roll-up to an item in the company’s portfolio. That is the best way to provide the visibility and transparency leaders need to help make better decisions and to be able to support the teams overall.
3. SIZE – Point estimates provide you a relative ranking of the size of your backlog and are one measure of the potential for delivery of a sprint, release, feature.
4. TEAM – Align the work to the team, it’s the agile way. Assigning the work to a team is even more important to me than an owner. The Team will take it from here…
5. DEPENDENCIES – Establish the upstream and downstream dependencies to be able to track and manage any potential problems, and to help notify other teams of things you might be putting in their way.
6. BLOCKERS – Is the story in trouble? Blockers are the main way to truly know that. Be transparent and use blockers to do your dirty work.
7. CONVERSATIONS – Document all conversations associated to that backlog item using meaningful and descriptive conversations.

When every team in your enterprise follows these seven rules, your Portfolio, Program and Team level reporting has the consistency and predictably you need to compete with any company in the world.