A Standard Iteration and Release Pattern for the Enterprise?

I’ve discussed “around this topic” in the book and in various posts as well as the classroom environment, but it occurs to me that I’ve never directly proposed nor published a standard pattern for iterations and releases for the enterprise. While “standardization and agile” are unlike things in many agilists minds, I often fall back [...]

Role of the Product Manager

I’ve been blogging off and on the “agile product manager vs. agile product owner” roles over the last few months. (These are categorized under Product owner/Product Manager) In one post (Responsibilities of the Agile Product Owner vs. Enterprise Product Manager) we noted that within the enterprise, it’s not always appropriate nor feasible to have [...]

Release Planning Day 1 Schedule (AERP4)

Note: this is one of a continuing series of posts, categorized under Release Planning.
In earlier posts, I’ve described the critical role that release planning plays in enterprise agility. I’ve described the motivations and objectives (AERP1 and AERP2) and planning and preparation (AERP3).
Over time, I’ve developed a somewhat standardized, two-day “program” for such an event which [...]

Register for the London Course

I’ll be teaching the one-day course, Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Larger Enterprises, March 27, 2008 at the Southwark Mercure London City Bankside Hotel, 71-79 Southwark StreetLondon from 9:00-17:00. The hotel is a 10 minute walk from Waterloo or Waterloo east, and a five minute walk from the Southwark tube stop.

The course is filling [...]

Organizing and Planning the Release Planning Event (AERP3)

Note: this post is part of a continuing series on Release Planning. The main posts in the series are organized and numbered sequentially (AERP1-n), and there are additional posts under the Release Planning category as well.
Participants
As we have described, (Release Planning: The Agile Enterprise Main Event (AERP2)) the release planning meeting is the seminal event [...]

Release Planning: the Agile Enterprise Main Event (AERP2)

Note: This post is part of a continuing series where I’ve been discussing the critical role that release planning has in enterprise agility.
These seminal release planning events are one of the key mechanisms the enterprise can apply to use its emerging agile practices to drive a coordinated and directed strategy into the marketplace – a [...]

Does Development Productivity go DOWN before it goes UP?

One of the challenges I often have when talking to industry executives about a significant enterprise agile transformation is that they are usually pretty smart! After all, to have achieved their current position, they have probably been around for a while and they have likely delivered some hundreds of millions of dollars in software [...]

Yes, Enterprise Agility is Hard – But Release Planning Helps (AERP-1)

Note: This is the first post (AERP-1) in a series on Agile Enterprise Release Planning which I hope to continue over the next few weeks. They’ll be labeled AERP1-n, so you can eventually read them in sequence, front to back, if you like.
From the last post, Yes, Enterprise Agility is Hard, I noted:
“I’ve also [...]

Yes, Enterprise Agility is Hard

In my continued work with some of the larger software enterprises, sometimes I am still surprised at just how difficult mastery of agile practices can be. (Of course this affects only those concerns with the courage to try!) And it’s hard twice:
Once – at the team level, as the individual component teams struggle to master [...]

You Might Need Better Release Planning if…..

The following bit I wrote was just published as the Tip of the Month in Agile University’s newsletter for February.

IF your agile team is just getting into the flow in a nascent agile enterprise, and if your teams have been head down so long meeting near term iteration objectives that they are starting to ask [...]