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SAFe 4: PI Planning Step-By-Step

“Plans are things that change” — Fujio Cho, Toyota “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” — Dwight D. Eisenhower “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face” — Mike Tyson Contents PI Planning Goals SAFe Framework Overview SAFe Requirements Hierarchy SAFe Program Backlog Construction & Refinement PI Planning Formats PI Planning…

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SAFe 5: PI Execution

Summary Additional governance is required to plan, and coordinate the execution of Program Increments.  A dedicated role to support PI execution processes – Release Train Engineer (RTE) ensures delivery teams are not distracted from delivery tasks. With appropriate instrumentation, execution progress can be measured, so that timely adaptation can be applied when necessary. Definitions Portfolio:…

Scrum-Of-Scrums

“Alan: Now, how to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well, you blow in one end and move your fingers up and down the outside.”  – Monty Python Over the weekend I read at least a dozen articles online on the topic of Scrum-Of-Scrums, and I must say I felt like I had been watching that…

Agile Data Science – Part 1

Massive amounts of data being generated and collected across virtually all parts of business ecosystems – manufacturing, supply chains, marketing, online advertising, customer relationship management, social media – making business operations open to data mining for business problem solving and competitive advantage. The work of a data science team (or if you prefer, data engineering…

Self-Organized Teams

“Scrum exposes every inadequacy or dysfunction within an organization’s product and system development practices. The intention of scrum is to make them transparent so the organization can fix them. Unfortunately, many organizations change scrum to accommodate the inadequacies or dysfunctions instead of solving them”. Ken Schwaber. After a couple of months into an agile transformation…

WSJF – Simplified

Try this … Get proposed feature list Assign “business value points” using Fibonacci – just relative ranking – use Planning Poker – this is a team exercise with PO’s, Architects, others from the associated delivery team. Complete this step for entire feature list before moving on to step 3. Assign “cost points” (or “size points”,…

New Scrum Team Bootup

“We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action, try to do something? You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures…

Accidental Agilists

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce, Ulysses   “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” – Jules Verne, A Journey to the Center of the Earth   “Our own attitude is that…

Where are we (really)?

“Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.” W. Edwards Deming. The project is underway and I need a feature-level view of where we are. Burn-down charts for user stories are great but do not give me the business-level picture. Burn-down charts calibrated in hours are dangerous – you can burn-down lots of hours…

Ideal Iteration Length

Ideal Iteration Length – A survey Recently I put the question of the rationale for a max sprint length of 30 days to one of my LinkedIn groups. Here are the responses: The idea is that anything over 30 days is too large to effectively break down and estimate properly and for everyone to keep…

Lean Roots

Agile software development has its roots in the lean manufacturing paradigm developed at Toyota – the Toyota Production System (TPS). Lean manufacturing centers on creating more value with less work. One central principle of lean manufacturing is to relentlessly work on identifying and eliminating all sources of waste from the manufacturing process, and also to…

Production-Ready Iterations

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. So says the first principle of the Agile Manifesto. Software development teams aspire to be able to produce increments of production-ready code in every iteration, where ‘production-ready’ may mean something like: 100% unit tested, 100% feature tested, 100% system/performance/stress…