Email is no longer keeping up with my Agile Product Owner cadence

Posted on January 15, 2012
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It’s been a slow demise, but I definately feel that email in the agile workplace is becoming more and more a followp tool than the pervasive corporate killer app it once was. Let me explain.

Our sprint kicks off in the typical manner, planning. This takes place in a room, with a web conferencing tool and face to face communications. No email.

Once we agree on the work, and work commences, communications still happen real-time, either in a chat room, or in person. No email.

If someone is blocked, I am informed they are blocked in either the standup, in person, or in the chat room. Email comes into play here as a followup, and only if I rely on a project management tool that has email notifications. But even that is after the fact, and hopefully the issue has been resolved before I even get to the email notification.

We do design reviews, architecture reviews, acceptance test reviews in person, or through our web conferencing tools. Email is only used here for notification of artifact locations or change.

Story acceptance happens in person, or through our web conferencing tool, and is celebrated in the same way. Usually high fives or explosive fist bumps are required.

All these scenarios assume your product owner is available to the team, which in my mind is one of the strongest attributes POs bring to the team; the availability to answer the 100′s of questions, issues, and clarifications that get raised on a day to day basis in an effort to keep product development flow moving.

So what has my use of email morphed into? For me, my email has become my own personal backlog of calendar notifications, random attachments, competitive information, event notifications and invitations, and personal notes. Typically, I read it early in the morning, and after the day has ended. I no longer rely on it for real-time management and support of my agile team(s). If my sprint needs attention, real time tools are best. My computer has become an orchestra of beeps, bings, chimes, and rings all notifying me real time that the sprint needs help.

There is one final essential use of email in agile. Remote teams on opposite timezones still relying on it for communication. Until we can magically fix the human sleep requirement, the real time tools just don’t cut it. I’ll work on that solution during my next sleepless night. :-)

Cheers,

Jennifer

Saddened

Posted on December 2, 2011
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I was informed this weekend of a tragic loss to our Agile community. Mauricio Zamora passed on Thanksgiving day. He was a founder at Scaled Agile Partners, a dedicated team of Agilists committed to sharing and scaling the benefits of Agile through the Scaled Agile Framework. I only just met him weeks ago, but was truly drawn to his passion, knowledge, and love for life and his family.
More here.
Life is too short. Share, mentor, continuously learn, and be kind to others. We are all connected in this small world.

Much love goes out to his family, friends and partners.

Developing High Assurance Software – Aren’t we all?

Posted on November 27, 2011
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The importance of delivering high assurance software becomes more critical as your software products and applications become pervasive and ubiquitous, and human beings, communities, as well as the corporate infrastructures that deliver these products rely on their performance and quality to make critical budgetary, corporate, personal, or life decisions. Thus, the more users you have, the pressure to build software with proven development processes that enable the highest assurance for your users surmounts.

That’s a mouthful to digest, but the point is, when we endeavour on our career journeys to deliver great product via software, “high assurance software” is really the end-game, isn’t it? In the end, we want our customers to rely on our products to make decisions that better their lives, so that we can continue to innovate, and deliver product in which humans will trust, invest in, and use on a daily basis.

I wanted to point out perhaps the obvious, as Agile development practices that I enjoy blogging about are no longer viewed as “loosely structured” or “lightweight methods” that make developers jobs more enjoyable. Agile has become the most effective and disciplined way to build software to date.

To validate my rantings, I invite you to download and read Dean Leffingwell’s latest white paper: Agile Software Development with Verification and Validation in High Assurance and Regulated Environments.

Not to ruin the ending, but here’s a quote from the conclusion of the article, which perhaps will entice you to read the white paper from the beginning:

“Driven by quantified improvements in productivity, quality and employee morale, Agile software development methods are making their way into one of the last bastions of waterfall development: those industries developing high assurance software where the cost of defects and solution failures is insurmountable.

We analyzed one industry example, looking at the regulations and guidance associated with the development of medical devices under the auspices of the US FDA. Perhaps surprisingly to some, we have confirmed that current regulatory advice that dates back more than a decade, does not mandate waterfall development. Rather, many of these guidance documents counsel the industry away from waterfall development and toward concurrent engineering. We also highlighted the mandated requirement for software verification and validation, and how in turn, effective V&V is dependent on maintaining correct and specific requirements documents, including software requirements specifications, product requirements documents and traceability matrices.”

Happy reading!

 

2nd Annual Flash Mob Release Retrospect

Posted on November 13, 2011
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I just wanted to followup with a quick retrospect on our Flash Mob release from this year’s sprint:

PS: If you can’t identify me, I’m the ass!

Rocky Mountain Product Camp – Wrap-up

Posted on October 30, 2011
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Many thanks to all the dedicated product folks who demonstrated their commitment to finding better ways to deliver great product today by spending their Saturday at Rocky Mountain Product Camp.

Jennifer Fawcett introducing the talk

Catherine Connor and I presented two back-to-back sessions, the first being a Panel where we shared “Product Manager/Product Owner: Scars from the Horses Mouth.” Fortunately, we don’t have any photos or videos (ie: you had to be there) but we did foster engaging and honest discussions with the audience. I was honored to have my Product Manager and peer, Jennifer Jaffe join us for that session, and she added her great and heartfelt perspective as well.

Our second session was an “Ask the Expert” session where we introduced the audience the proven division of Product Management/Product Owner responsibilities that needs to happen to support the business when your development teams go agile.  The presentation was titled: “Product Managers and Product Owners: Cutting their Teeth,”  and attached for download here.

Catherine and Jennifer Presenting the Shared Responsibilities

Looking forward to continuously improving these presentations and sharing at future conferences! Let me know what you think.

Cheers,

–Jennifer

A Thrilling Release!

Posted on October 23, 2011
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Last year, we took a chance on releasing a Thriller Flash Mob, just in time for our Halloween party. Being the Agile organization that we are, we pulled development and business stakeholders together, did release planning, themed our sprints, and released on time! Our customers were delighted!

Here’s a visual look into our plan:

Release Planning: Breaking down the stories. As you can see, there’s quite a bit of uncertainty about the knowledge of the stories at this time. We estimated the stories pretty high.

Sprint #1 - Laying Down Code. Now that we have a full understanding, we’re well into our development phase. Our burndown is looking good.

Sprint #2 – Integration. Feature level coding is complete, so we decided it was time to integrate into our backend (music). This was a high risk at first as our code wasn’t fine tuned in Sprint #1. But it’s going smoothly, and our velocity increased.

Sprint #3 - Final Bug Burndown. Our rehearsal helped flush out any final high-priority bugs.

Sprint #4 – Beta Testing. Final Beta, with real customers and costumes!

RELEASE! – Our customers were thrilled!

I hope you enjoyed this view of our release. We start planning for this year’s Flash Mob release on Monday.

Cheers

PS: Drew, this one is for you!

Product Owners and Product Managers: Scars Directly from the Horses Mouth

Posted on October 22, 2011
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Be sure to vote for your favorite product topics at Rocky Mountain Product Camp next Saturday 10/29/11.

This particular topic seems to be a current favorite. Cast your vote for a lively and somewhat therapeutic panel targeted specifically for questions of Product Manager and Product Owners:

Product Owner and Product Manager Scars Directly from the Horses’ Mouth

Ask your questions to a seasoned team of product professionals who will offer their honest and sometimes different perspectives of both roles. A panel of product managers and product owners who have lived the struggle of effectively performing all the necessary product management functions when development goes Agile. Bring your hard questions about the product owner role, the product manager role, and product marketing roles, accountability for each, challenges, egos, and how they deal with them. Panelists will share tips to avoid the pitfalls agile brings to product management, and their experience overcoming the challenges.

Hope to see you there!

Agile Software Requirements, the book is now available!

Posted on January 9, 2011
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Agile Software Requirements

Agile Software Requirements

Agile Software Requirements, Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise is now available online and on your local bookshelves.

Written by Dean Leffingwell, this book provides an unprecedented amount of proven knowledge and expertise in agile requirements management, lean development methods and software lifecycle management. This book is a critical resource if you are a practitioner or a contributor to software development teams of any size.

The book contains real requirements and story examples from my work at Tendril, Inc.  Tendril is a leading energy management technology provider that is helping to drive the large-scale deployment of the Smart Grid through the development of forward-thinking solutions as well as its work to establish industry protocols.

Add the book to your development library today!

Agile Growing Pains – Making the product owner role work in a fast growing enterprise

Posted on February 12, 2010
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From my organization’s Product Owner land, we have many people participating in the individual tasks and requirements of the Agile Product Owner role from an engineering and product management perspective, but, no one person has taken it on, nor has the organization fully figured out how to embed the role. I keep scratching my head about why this is so hard, but clearly, it has it’s challenges. Internally, I view this as a process lifecycle and growth social artifact. In our process lifecycle, we’ve adopted Scrum, we are agile in our engineering execution efforts, we do release planning (note to self, this is another blog I could go off on), we have short release cycles and quick iterations, and we plan to re-plan often. We’re certainly not perfect, but we are committed to continuous process improvement and delivering incremental product value to market early and often. But, this APO social artifact has still not found a home.

Interestingly enough, we have clearly defined the role and organizational need as follows:

Position Summary

Wanted: Qualified Product Owners who will work with our product management and engineering teams to deliver products, on time. The Product Owner will have responsibility for engineering project management and product completion.

Responsibilities:

Experience requirements:

There it is, in a nice, concise job description. But, clearly, it’s not that easy. Here are some of our APO social artifact adoption challenges and possible mitigation strategies:

Challenge Mitigation Strategies
Engineers want a direct tie to Product Managers to
ask detailed feature questions. Don’t want an APO in the middle.
Product Managers don’t have time and are externally focused		 Hire within. This role needs to be a trusted entity who can carry the requirements forward on the business organization as well as be a technical leader in the engineering organization who can make the detailed implementation decisions on behalf of the Product Manager.
Yet, another management layer. Who needs that? Perhaps true. But what better way to ensure product delivery and JIT decisions that increase velocity and decrease time to market?
Engineering wants Product Management to be more involved.
Product Management is building a  strategic/outward facing organization in order to grab those market opportunities.		 Growing pains! Again, lack of trust in the APO role. Never had one before! FUD factor. Hire within and have the APO live the dotted line.
Product Management thinks engineering should absorb the APO role. Engineering thinks Product Management should absorb the APO role Someone has to! Don’t get stuck on where this role lives within the business. The reporting lines should be dotted throughout the organization.
The need is there regardless of where it lives in the organization.
Strong personalities throughout the organization are tough to negotiate. No one within the organization wants the role or the encompassing responsibilities. It seems too big, too hard. Yes, it is hard. And, good ones are hard to find. The APO needs unrelenting negotiation skills, engineering empathy and respect, and yet have the ability maintain business prowess. He also needs to be “Switzerland”, and not visibly take sides, rather be a cross-team leader while continuously balancing business requirements and engineering scope. No wonder the position isn’t filled :-)

Perhaps a more logical adoption path for a start up moving from a technology-driven organization to a market-driven strategy would be to build the Product Owner role as the predecessor to the Product Management role. After all, most technology companies start in an R&D phase, and then move into the product and marketing phase. Funding the Product Owner role before the Product Manager role would enable the Product Owner adoption early and fill the gap. The next obvious position to fund in an organization’s lifecycle would be the Product Manager role as initial R&D winds down, and product markets open up.

But, we live for change, plan to re-plan, and continuously improve. Our APO social artifact will become a full-time role soon, I’m sure.

Agile 2010

Posted on February 4, 2010
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I’m pleased to once again be on the Agile Conference Review Committee for 2010 for the Agile Product Management track. The Product Manager review committee is kindly lead by Rich Mironov of Enthiosys.

This year, the conference is in Nashville, TN, August 9-13. The deadline for submissions is February 26th. Get your submissions in early!

Visit http://agile2010.agilealliance.org/ for more information.

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