Predictive Agility Archives

18Oct 2017 by jerrye316@aol.com

Cultivating Agile: WIP As A Mindset

agile, best practices, Kanban, Predictive Agility, Scrum

Limiting work in progress (WIP) is a mindset shift! Limiting WIP has many benefits. What is your WIP mindset? The blog Do A Few Things Insanely Great emphasizes that we can actually "do more with less". The idea is that we can increase our flow rates, decrease wait times, and eliminate bottlenecks when we limit WIP. This leads to increased productivity, improved team morale, more visibility into ongoing work, and better metrics on velocity and project progress. There is more personal satisfaction in seeing things actually completed rather than having a full plate of ongoing work. Limiting WIP also makes us identify and focus on those tasks which have the highest value since we can only work on a few things at a time. If we can only do a few things,…

The Executive’s Project Dashboard – Red Light, Green Light

agile, Agile Manifesto, Predictive Agility

Executives want to view overall project status with a quick glance. Project managers often create the stop light dashboard as a tool to visually convey this information. How do we measure progress in Agile projects? According to one of the twelve principles from the Agile Manifesto, working software is the primary measure of progress. Revising the dashboard to reflect actual rather than planned progress may give a better indicator of project progress. The dashboard consists of multiple stop lights to display status. Each stop light reflects the status for a feature or planned activity of the project. The light is green if the status is "on track", is yellow if the status is "at risk" with minor issues, and is red if the status is "behind schedule or off track."…

Predictive Agility – When will we get there?

agile, Predictive Agility, Scrum

I will describe how maturing Agile projects can actually provide more transparency into the current project status and estimates with higher confidence levels than those typically used in traditional project planning. I will call this "Predictive Agility". I will focus more on Scrum but the same principles apply to other Agile methodologies like Kanban. Many executive and managers who are considering adopting Agile have the misconception that Agile projects do not have the ability to give an estimate of when a product release will be ready for launch. In their roles, they need to communicate the status and projections of new products to potential customers, stakeholders, and business shareholders. In some cases, a product must have new features and be ready by a certain date or else there is no reason to start…