Category: Agile
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The Team Dependency Matrix
In the large organizations I work with, dependencies are the number one blocker preventing fast flow. In these organizations that, for budgetary reasons, do annual planning, dependencies are the most significant determining factor to the success of their plans and the biggest afterthought. The tendency I see is for teams to plan their work as…
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Experimenting With Controlling Cycle Time Instead of WIP
Limiting how many stories or tasks can occupy any particular activity in a team’s flow is a commonly recommended practice for teams using kanban systems. This way, the team can avoid overloading their system, reduce multitasking, and improve focus and quality. Applying work-in-progress (WIP) limits to kanban systems at the story or task level reveals…
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The Power of Predictable Delivery
With most of the Agile teams I’ve been exposed to, I’ve noticed that they spend easily over a hundred person-hours every month on practices like updating plans, reporting metrics, estimating, and sharing status updates. To them, these are some of the core practices that make them Agile. In general, as a way to be less…
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Manage the Value, Not the Work
Do you think of software development as an exercise in identifying the right problem, doing the right analysis and getting the right people to code the right features? Or is it more of a discovery and learning activity where you make a bet, build something and get feedback? In the former approach, organizations will create…
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Avoiding The Pitfalls of Cross-Functional Super Teams
I’ve previously written about cross-functional teams and what it means for a team to be cross-functional. In that same post, I wrote about Team Topology’s concept of a stream-aligned team. To recap, stream-aligned teams: Suppose autonomous and independent cross-functional teams that own an entire “slice” of a business domain are the ideal way to organize…
Flow Focused 