Delivery Process

"Product? Project?"

Estimation Alternatives, Part 2: Products vs. Projects

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"Product? Project?"“I don’t understand products vs. projects. What’s the difference?”

When I share some of my stories about working with product development teams, some people look at me as if I’m describing the impossible. They seem confused when I tell them about agile teams that didn’t have to provide story point estimates to management or normalize points across teams. What I’m talking about is so far outside of their experience, they can’t conceive of how it could work. One of the most challenging things for me to explain to people who haven’t experienced both is the difference between project- and product-based organizations.

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Estimation Alternatives, Part 1: Feature Budgets

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A metal pail filled with hundred dollar bills.
A powerful estimation alternative is to treat project funding as a budget and charter teams to spend it effectively.

The most common question on any project is, “How long with this take?” This question isn’t too difficult to answer when the work is small – a few minutes to a few days. Problems start when someone wants an estimate for a chunk of work you can’t complete in just a few days. Requests for estimates like this come from a need to make higher-level planning decisions. But estimates aren’t the only way to make these decisions. Over the last fifteen years of working with agile teams, I’ve seen value in exploring estimation alternatives. Two, in particular, come to mind, the first of which I’ll describe here: Shifting conversations about estimating to budget discussions.

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Antique key in a keyhole

The Secret to Backlog Refinement (and Five Bonus Tips)

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Antique key in a keyhole“What’s the secret to backlog refinement?”

Eighteen pairs of eyes turned to look at me, waiting for my answer to this product manager’s question. I’d spent the last two days with the group working through the challenges they faced using Scrum in their company. We discovered that most of their delivery problems stemmed from the teams not understanding what was needed. They’d identified with the story I’d told about the team that hated Sprint Planning and hit the reset button on their process. They knew they weren’t doing refinement and could see the effect. They wanted to know how to make it work for them.

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How One Team Hit “Reset” on Its Planning Meeting

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A large, red, mechanical button labeled reset, mounted on a wall.The team was angry. Every two weeks, they would find themselves five hours into their sprint planning meeting with no end in sight. Every two weeks, it was the same: Their product manager showed up with a pile of requests the team hadn’t seen before – estimated by someone elsewhere in the organization – and wanted to know precisely how many the team could finish in the next iteration. Everyone hated sprint planning. It was stressful, wasteful, and unproductive. Something had to change.

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Water flowing over rocks in a mountain stream.

How to Improve Transparency and Flow in Your Team’s Work

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Water flowing over rocks in a mountain stream.
Teams should expect surprises to happen – even if they don’t know exactly what or when. Agreements about how to manage challenges when they do occur can keep them from disrupting the team’s flow.

The team was struggling. They were working on an industrial motion control product, porting a legacy code base to a new hardware platform. Parts of the code were decades old, and many of the original developers no longer worked at the company. They kept getting stuck trying to figure out how the code worked and what they needed to do to make it work in the new system. Neither the engineers nor the product manager had visibility into what was taking so long or how to help.

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Spinning plates again a blue sky

The Realities of Task Switching

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Spinning plates again a blue sky
Plate spinning may be entertaining to watch, but it is rarely a good way to be effective.

Most people and organizations want to have an impact. They don’t exert effort for no purpose; they want to accomplish something. Waste – spending time and energy on things that don’t contribute to an outcome you want to create – gets in the way of that. Wasteful activities reduce our personal and organizational effectiveness. Waste comes in many different forms, and one of the most pernicious is task switching.

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A Short History of Kanban (and Lean) (Part 3)

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The history of lean and kanban is a challenge to boil down, so inevitably, I know there are aspects that are missing here. The title says “short” because, while there is a lot of information here, it is short in terms of how more is out there!  Additionally, there are often disagreements on certain aspects and points around the history, and we’ve sourced the various elements included in this outline.  A key part of understanding kanban is going beyond the principles and practices, to understand what is behind it work. The history points us to a critical key. 

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What is Kanban (看板)? [Part 1]

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This is a common question, since Kanban can have several word uses and meanings in the agile space. The term gets thrown around a lot, making it even more confusing. In order to understand Kanban and where it comes from, let’s start with some basic definitions and the foundations. We start with the basics, because there is often confusion around what kanban is.

Simple definitions of kanban:

  • a signboard or billboard in Japanese
  • a just-in-time method of inventory control, originally developed in Japanese automobile factories
  • a Japanese lean manufacturing system in which the supply of components is regulated through the use of an instruction card sent along the production line
  • an agile approach or framework

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