Every agile method comes with opinions, and every enterprise comes with exceptions. A team that builds a mobile app, a team that integrates an enterprise resource planning (ERP) package, and a team that maintains a 20-year-old billing system don’t share…
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If we think of a software project as a living organism, with a beginning and an end, we can describe its anatomy. Anatomy is the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. In Greek, the word literally means…
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Most scaling frameworks answer the question “How do we coordinate many teams?” by adding things: roles, layers, planning events, and diagrams that need a large monitor. Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) answers with a different instinct. It asks what you can take…
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Many project management office (PMO) consultants, program managers, and project managers will tell you, “Yes, many projects and programs have unrealistic and inflexible deadlines.” Many of them have been assigned to so many projects at once that, without time management,…
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When teams go agile, the project management office (PMO) is often the first group to feel the chill. Templates, weekly status reports, and compliance checks suddenly look like friction to people who want to ship. Some PMOs respond by tightening…
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Ask a dozen enterprises where their agile adoption struggles and a surprising number will give the same answer. It isn’t the developers, the tools, or the training. It’s the product owner. The role looks simple on a Scrum diagram, and…
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Scrum works well for one team of seven or so people. Big companies, though, have dozens of teams that depend on each other, plus portfolios of work that executives need to steer. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), introduced in 2011…
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Most large companies can’t drop their gate reviews overnight, and most shouldn’t try. Gates exist because executives need to decide where to put money, and that need doesn’t go away when a team starts using Scrum. The good news is…
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When the Project Management Institute (PMI), the organization behind the Project Management Professional (PMP) credential and the PMBOK Guide, launched its own agile certification, plenty of people raised an eyebrow. The PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) became available in 2012.…
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Every few weeks, someone in a steering meeting declares that waterfall is dead and agile is the answer. Then someone else asks how agile will work for the data center migration. Both people have a point, and neither has the…
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