Agile*Product*AI

The democrats and republicans are doing a fine job of "fire-bombing" the centrists in both their parties (I grabbed that quote from an article "It's not easy being George" in this month’s Vanity Fair). And, as I scan the agile groups and blogosphere, it seems the methodologists are doing it as well. Some of us take the "extreme" in extreme programming too literally, and others are holding on to some of agile developments long disproved stigma for far too long. My approach always has been (and hopefully always will be, unless of course I turn out like my father, which all of us eventually do...) a pragmatic one. There are many things I love about Scrum and agile - driving elaboration and development off the backlog, test-driven development, burndown charts, and much more. And there are a some that I could do without (self-organizing teams, developers and testers are interchangeable, ... I blog on these later). An agile approach needs to be tailored to y...

One of the most important things I’ve learned from my recent stint in the project and portfolio management (PPM) space is that business success is not just about efficient and effective project execution (agile or traditional). Success is more determined by making sure that your precious resources are working on projects that return the most value to the organization. I can execute the hell out of a project and bring it in 25% ahead of schedule with a satisfied customer. But if my competitors are delivering new higher value products that satisfy a broader customer base, then I will be left in the dust. The irony is that they may have worst project execution and still beat me in the end if they’ve selected the right projects to invest in! In the PPM space, determining what project investments to make is typically considered part of demand management. Demand management considers inputs from a variety of internal and external sources including customers, analysts, partners, IT, business u...

I have been repeatedly asked why agile is better than traditional approaches. The most succinct answer I have is that agile software enables you to build the right software at the right time. Agile is not about in-depth analysis and design that leads to a detailed work breakdown structure that predicts on what day of the year eighteen months in the future a team will deliver a certain set of features. Agile is about continuous prioritization and customer review to ensure that meaningful features are delivered when they are ready and when they are needed. The ability to make significant changes to design and behavior throughout the evolution of a system is perhaps one of the biggest differentiators of software development from other engineering disciplines. And because we can, we should, and usually do. This allows organization who embrace agile principles to have agility in how their business execute as well. Being agile implies applying approaches and processes that maximize an organi...