In agile speak, a spike is a special type of user story that is time-boxed for research purposes, a sort of an R&D exercise that is accounted for in sprint planning and capacity. This agile mechanism gives your engineering the opportunity to dive deeper into a problem and address some of the open questions, that […]
What is a User Acceptance Criteria? User Acceptance Criteria or UAC, is the contract between the product owner and scrum team, letting them know what needs to be done functionality wise, in order to meet the user’s need and exit successfully. A set of explicit and exhaustive conditions, that detail comprehensively the scope of the […]
If I had a penny for every time I brought in a new group of engineers to work on a project, and had to debate with engineers, on the merits of using a proper project management tool, beyond Trello or GitHub issues. As a program or project manager, you want to be able to track […]
Something many PMBOK practitioners are familiar with already, but always worth honing in on, is the project or program ritual of formalizing a project charter. A project charter is the pinnacle of any project, it is the justification and mandate for kicking off a project. Most commonly prepared at the start of a project by […]
Most practitioners associate the tenets of the agile manifesto as the guiding principles in executing their scrum agendas. In this article, With the premise of Scrum optimized on empirical process control, I wanted to spend some time looking into the three pillars of Scrum theory: transparency, inspection and adaption and provide some annotation on what they really mean, and why these pillars should be the foundations of your practice.
Something as a practicing program manager I tend to always use as tenets when guiding teams, is relying on the spiritual bible of contemporary project management, and that’s the Agile Manifesto. Products of the Agile Alliance, the premise of the Manifesto is to simplify the practice of project management through a lightweight framework to build software expeditiously with bias for customer validation over processes and documentation and red tape.
The two drivers behind the manifesto are iterative and incremental development, over pre-medicated and over planning, and creating higher quality software in shorter time, or more concisely, build more with less.
Overwhelmingly, tech companies have transitioned their sprint iterations from co-location to having teams work remotely, from home. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced teams to change how they interact with each other, perform agile rituals and deliver products.
One thing that is missing, is osmotic communications, learning through accidentally overhearing.
A great bar-raiser for a user story as a product manager, is to leverage a well-known industry mnemonic, called INVEST. Any user story that fails to meet that criteria should definitely be a candidate for a re-write. So what is INVEST? “The INVEST acronym applies to having superior quality in the actual product backlog and […]
