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Table of Contents
Agile Ways of Working
Wednesday 17 November 2021
Diego Villaneuva
Masterclass
Instead of Project budgeting at the start of a waterfall project, some agile team adopt team-funded approach: every 3 months, show MVPs which justify the team's continued existence
Tuesday 16 November 2021
Sandeep Shouche
Case study
Epic/Story format: As a <user/persona> I want <feature> so that <reason>
Epic looks at the transaction to be improved, while Stories looks at the different aspects needed to deliver the Epic
Monday 15 November 2021
Sandeep Shouche
Scrum ceremonies from PO perspective
- Planning
- Standup
- Backlog Review
- Review/Demo
- Retro
Sprint Planning: https://youtu.be/2A9rkiIcnVI
- Sprint Goal
- Definition of Ready
- User stories relation with other stories
- Prioritised
Daily Stand-up
- 10 mins: Extended discussions can be taken offline in Meet-After
- What was accomplished yesterday, Plans for today and Impediments
Backlog Refinement
- Backlog includes stories further down the list
- Make each story Definition of Ready
- Assign Level of Complexity (No. of Story Points)
- Optional timing: sometimes neglected. Sandeep: sometime in latter half of sprint, before demo. Helps PO get prioritisation ready for next Sprint Planning
Sprint demos/reviews
- Conclusion of sprint
- Key to Feedback iterations
- liaison between team and stakeholders
- prepare team for demo, expected questions, points to highlight
Sprint retrospective
- PO is optional. concern that PO may inhibit discussions
- What went well last sprint
- What improvements
- Define, Discover, Determine, Diagnose, Drive
Alignment vs Autonomy
- Leaders need to provide vision
- Transparent
Wednesday 10 November 2021
Sandeep Shouche
Scrum ceremonies
How to conduct stand-up meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBKuYzqvZmI
How to conduct retrospective meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjzdG0G5SI8 Agile Retrospectives - Making good teams great: Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
Other Agile frameworks
XP is the discipline that Scrum forgot: Scrum states the What that needs to be done. But XP the How developers/programmers go about delivering
Continuous Integration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPFz5deXOw
Tuesday 9 November 2021
Sandeep Shouche
Project cost/benefits
- PBP: Payback period
- ROI
- NPV: need discount rate
- IRR
Risk/Value: Comparing between high-value features, do the riskier ones first to have more time/runway to deal with unexpected issues
Kano model: Customer satisfaction vs Degree of implementation (How much of feature/project has been completed)
- Mandatory
- Utility
- Exciters/Delighters
Karl Weigers Relative Weights Method: Priority defined by
- Value: Benefits - Penalty of not having the feature
- Risk
- Cost
Estimation
Story points
- Team agree on estimating size (Fibonacci numbers), by comparing previously completed effort/projects
- Story point estimation encapsulates difficulty, complexity, risk,
Article: A fairly thorough guide to understanding Velocity vs. Capacity https://shortcut.com/blog/understanding-velocity-vs-capacity
Affinity estimation: https://www.planningpoker.com/
- PO explains story to team and answer questions
- Every team member chooses a Fibonacci numbered card corresponding to estimation
- After all questions answered, everybody show their card at the same time
- Where there are differences, they are discussed until consensus is arrived
- Not showing cards earlier reduces cajoling and swaying others
Monday 8 November 2021
Sandeep Shouche
Risk Management
Dealing with Risk:
- Avoid
- Mitigate
- Transfer
- Accept
Rolling Agile contracts
Whirlwind tour of Agile/Scrum terminologies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5k7a9YEoUI
Scrum model
- ADAPT: Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promote, and Transfer.
User stories:
- Independent
- Negotiable
- Valuable
- Estimable
- Small
- Testable
MMF: Minimally Marketable Functionality
MVP: Minimum Viable Product
MMR
MBI
- Product. I'm using this term loosely to mean a product, a service, a combination of the two, or a new “big feature” of an existing product. I personally prefer the term offering, but product is the popular term.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is an investment in learning, an experiment where your goal is to explore what a potential customer wants. To run this experiment you'll create a version of a product via the least effort possible so as to be used for validated learning about your potential customers. MVPs are experiments to explore a hypothesis about what your customers really want. They aren't to the “real” running version of your end product because they aren't at the level of quality or scale that you would produce for the end product. Having said that, I have seen MVPs evolve into a real product, or more accurately a real MBI, but more often than not they evolve into something more along the lines of a prototype (which is fine because they're an investment in learning and were never meant to be the real thing). A team typically runs the experiment with a subset of your potential customers to test a new idea, to collect data about it, and thereby discover customers are actually interested in. Note that the term MVP was coined by Frank Robinson at SyncDev in 2001 and popularized by Eric Ries in his book Lean Startup in 2011.
- Minimum business increment (MBI). An MBI is the smallest piece of value that can be realized by a customer (internal or external) that is consistent with the strategy of your organization. An MBI adds value for your customers and leads to valuable feedback to the product team that the right functionality is being built and is being built in the right way. An MBI is a solution that contains all of the pieces that are required for value realization by customers. An MBI, when it is done right, is both an MMF and an MMR. Note that the term MBI was coined by Al Shalloway.
- Minimum Marketable Feature (MMF). An MMF is the smallest piece of functionality that can be delivered that has value to its customers, and thereby value to your organization. An MMF is a part of an MMR. The term MMF was first proposed by Denne and Cleland-Huang.
- Minimum Marketable Release (MMR). Successful products are deployed incrementally into the marketplace over time, each “major” deployment being referred to as a release. An MMR is the release of a product that has the smallest possible feature set that addresses the current new needs of your customers. MMRs are used to reduce the time-to-market between releases by reducing the coherent feature set of each release to the smallest increment that offers new value to customers. An MMR is one or more MBIs (ideally it is one).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kX7fgT8jUk
Application of Agile in a hospital: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33fniEHo91M
Wednesday 3 November 2021
Sandeep Shouche
Traditional project management forms
Key features of Project Management
- New and novel endeavour
- Has a planned completion date
7-minute cleaning on Shinkansen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWuT_yeQ0PY&t=85s
Definition of Programme Management
- group of related projects
- managed coordinated way
- benefits accrue by managing the projects together as a programme
PRINCE2:
- Output: focus of Projects
- Outcome: focus of Programmes
- Benefits: focus of Programmes
Definition of Portfolio Management
- identify, prioritise projects/programmes
- achieve strategic business objectives
Iron Triangle (Scope, Cost, Time) is now a Pentagon (Scope, Cost, Time, Quality and Risk)
Directing, Controlling, Supporting PMO Passive, Activist, Accountable PMO
Types of organisations:
- Functional
- Projectised
- Matrix: mix of Functional and Projectised
Other People's Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJRhrow3Jws&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q&t=39s
Critical Path
= Critical Chain: also considers resource availability/dependency
Project Libre PM software
Earned Value Management
- developed by Ericsson