Fun with Release Planning

Enterprise release planning is my favorite (business!) activity. Put all the right people in a room for a day or two, fuel them with caffeine and sugar. Present the strategy. Convert the strategy to vision and a set of the next-release objectives. Understand the impact of architectural refactors. Acknowledge deadlines that exist prior to even [...]

More on the Agile Release Train – Internal vs External Releases

In a number of posts, including Enterprise Agility – The Big Picture(5) The Release Revisited I’ve commented on the desirability of separating Internal Releases (or Potentially Shippable Increments) from External or General Availability Releases. Although not directly represented in the Big Picture itself, this is the assumption behind the Agile Release Train graphic in [...]

Enterprise Agility-Big Picture (5): The Release Revisited

In the post, Enterprise Agility-The Big Picture (5): The Release, we described that seminal, value delivery construct of the Agile Release. (see Big Picture below).
But as with all the other oversimplifications in the Big Picture, (which at times seems to create almost as many questions as answers) comments and questions have been raised about what [...]

Successes in Release Planning: An Agile Enterprise Tipping Point

In the “Release Planning” category and series on this blog, I described an enterprise best practice designed to coordinate the efforts of some number of agile teams in order to deliver a larger scale system in a somewhat predictive and systematic manner. I also described this process from a practitioner’s perspective in the Agile [...]

Meeting Deadlines: What’s wrong with this Release Plan #2? (AERP8)

In my last post, Meeting Deadlines: What’s wrong with this Release Plan #1, I noted that the ability to commit to and deliver on near term deadlines is a reasonable and necessary accomplishment of a professional agile team and enterprise. To achieve this, we depend a lot on the release planning function (see Release Planning [...]

Meeting Deadlines: What’s Wrong with this Release Plan? (AERP7)

Ideally, we wouldn’t have deadlines in agile. As Tom Gilb noted “it’s as though I as a project manager weren’t allowed to know the projects end until the date arrived. The only instructions I’d get in advance would be to “be ready to pack whatever you’ve got every morning and deliver it by close of [...]

Release Planning- Day 2 Narrative (AERP6)

Note: This is part of a series of posts (AERP1-n) highlighting the critical role that release planning plays in achieving enterprise agility. (These are organized under the Release Planning Category on this blog.) In my last post, Release Planning Day 1 Narrative, I described the program and content of the first day of a two [...]

Release Planning at Enterprise Scale – An Inside-Out Narrative

Some of you may have been following the series I’ve been posting on Release Planning at Enterprise Scale. This series of posts is aggregated under blog the category “Release Planning” and identified as (AERP1-n.) You may find it most helpful to read the posts from oldest (#1) to newest (#n) as it makes a better [...]

Release Planning Day 1 Narrative (AERP5)

Note: This is part of a series of posts (AERP1-n) highlighting the critical role that release planning plays in achieving enterprise agility.

Recently, I outlined a standard (or perhaps initial starting) agenda for Day 1 of such an event in the following graphic.

Here’s the hour-by hour narrative that should accompany this graphic.
Session I – Business Context
The [...]

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 [...]