Transforming to an Agile PMO

Here is the recording for the Transforming to an Agile PMO webinar I recently delivered for the PMI PMO Community. Would love to hear your feedback on it! I shared some of the key ‘waste’ areas within our organizations and some ideas for how the PMO can focus their efforts on addressing these areas with special attention on limiting the number of projects in execution at one time Please let me know what you think?

Quick Update: Due to popular demand for this webinar I recently presented a newer version of  this webinar for PMI’s LEAD Community. So you now have two versions to watch!

URL to download the presentation and cheat sheets: www.TinyUrl.com/agiletraining

You might also be interested in the Agile Idea Qualification and Project Initiation Webinar!

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building lean high performing collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I am the Agile Expert for the PMI Learning, Education and Development (LEAD) community of practice and I host a popular Agile webinar series and blogs on transforming to Agile. New PMI Agile Certified Practitioner PMI-ACP SM Exam Prep Workshops! Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta

Success Factors When Transforming to Agile

Many have asked me to summarize the top 4 or 5 critical success factors I’ve seen that have led to a successful and effective Agile transformation so I decided to blog about these. These come from our own experiences helping organizations transform.
Download our free Enterprise Agile Transformation Roadmap guide.

1. Developing a strategy for the transformation/Agile adoption upfront.
Developing a solid strategy that takes into account why you are transforming, what problems are you trying to fix or impovements do you seek? The strategy should consider both Process and People transformation needs. Inspecting and adapting it quarterly. Without this initial plan, you can easily fall into the trap of assuming the success of one or two Agile team means you have arrived at the transformation goals. This roadmap is critical to success because it helps create measurable milestones and an action plan to achieve them each year.

2. Strong Executive leadership commitment and active engagement. We’ve learned that the most successful transformations are the ones where we worked very closely with the key executives (such as the CIO) to help realize their vision. The successful executives rolled up their sleeves and were very engaged in the planning, review and tweaking of the roadmap. They played an active part in communicating the
message around the vision for the transformation to everyone in the company face to face through town halls, skip level meetings and open discussions.

3. Showing measurable results early; Getting excitement and positive energy.
This part is a must have for a successful transformation. That’s why we start with a pilot. Showing some results early, addressing concerns people will have about their roles and existing processes, and getting the business customers excited is instrumental to success.

4. Business partner engagement and buy-in early.  Educate the business customers (internal or external) on how Agile can benefit them, why the organization is considering trying this out, what existing pain points we are trying to address, how they can engage effectively and manage their other duties. Doing this early along with showing them measurable results will go a long way to giving your Agile Transformation the fuel it needs to succeed. We’ve found that once the business customers try Agile the right way, they seldom want to go back to traditional methods of delivery.

5. Have a strong expert partner. Honestly, adopting Agile successfully is hard when you don’t have any experts who are helping. It’s like
learning how to swim by reading a book. You need help influencing people and changing their hearts and minds so they are open to doing things differently. ‘Go be Agile or else ‘ won’t work for too long In addition to transformational workshops, teams need some expert coaching at the beginning to hold their hands during the first initial stages until they can ‘ride the bike’ on their own so to speak. Different level of education and coaching on different topics are needed as the organization moves from Piloting to Scaling to Enterprise Adoption.  You can find experts within your own organizations, hire external ones or use a combination of both (recommended!).

How To Start Agile Adoption?

I’m also frequently asked ‘Where do I start with Agile Adoption?‘ and Can you show me what an Enterprise Agile Adoption Roadmap would look like? so I’m sharing both links to these resources. What do YOU think? Any others you think are critical to the success of an Agile Transformation?

Let’s Chat!

To chat with us about developing a customized transfomation roadmap for your own oganization or team, please send us an online request, email or call us at 1.855.2Transform. We LOVE making successful Agile Transformations happen!

Answers to Top PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) ^SM Certification Questions

Just finished interviewing Rory McCorkle who is the product owner for the new PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) ^SM certification. For those who could not attend please watch the recorded version online, it is worth listening to! You will need a pmi.org username/password to login.

http://lead.vc.pmi.org/Webinars/ViewWebinar.aspx?WebinarAction=View&WebinarExternalKey=791467a0-b7c7-42a8-b4ce-7be05da6dfdb

Interested in the watching previous PMI webinars in our ‘Transforming to Agile’ series? Click here.

Below are some of the top answers:

Q: What is the value of this PMI-ACP ^SM certification to organizations and individuals?
A: There are several benefits but here are a few:

1. This certification is one of the few that crosses the methodological boundaries and does not focus on only one of the methods. Agile is an overarching framework that is a collection of methods such as Scrum, XP, Lean, Kanban and so on. Companies do not tend to use only one of these so this certification is more comprehensive in its coverage of topics and knowledge areas.
2. Additionally, the certification requires actual experience with Agile instead of being training related only. Instead of only attending training and being certified (actually referred to as a ‘certificate’ in the certification arena) you have to demonstrate experience with Agile and pass a comprehensive examination with an accredited certification body (PMI).

Q: Which certification should someone choose to get? the CSM, PMP® or PMI-ACP ^SM certification?
A: The PMP®  is designed to test your overall competence as a project manager through more rigorous examination, experience requirements and adherence to the PMI code of ethics. PMI-ACP ^SM certification is designed to test knowledge of Agile methods and practices so we see many PMP®  add on the PMI-ACP^SM to demonstrate their knowledge and ability to lead both types of traditional and Agile projects. When comparing the CSM and PMI-ACP ^SM certification, I would say they are for different audiences. The CSM is achieved by going into a classroom and sitting through the 2 day class. The current exam is not a pass/fail exam even though I know the ScrumAlliance is working on changing this shortly. It also focuses specifically on the Scrum method. PMI-ACP ^SM certification is intended for individuals looking for a certification that requires both training, experience with Agile and is more comprehensive in its coverage of topics.

Q: Which books are recommended as reading for the PMI-ACP ^SM certification?
A: The ones listed in the PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Reference Materials Guide: http://bit.ly/pmi-acp-reading-books. You should also follow the PMI-ACP^SM certification exam content outline: http://bit.ly/pmi-acp-exam-content-outline

Q: What’s the update on the PMI-ACP^SM Certification Pilot?
A: Since February 2011,

• 7,000+ people have signed up to receive further information about the PMI-ACP ^SM certification pilot
• 5,000+ individuals have responded to PMI’s “Agile knowledge” quiz
• 150,000+ individuals have visited PMI’s www.PMI.org/Agile launch page
• Since 23 May, 7,000+ applicants have opened a PMI-ACP ^SM certification application
• 1,300+ individuals have submitted a PMI-ACP ^SM certification application to participate in the pilot

Q: Will PMI create an AgileBOK? will PMI include Agile practices in the next versions of the PMBOK Guide?
A: No, there are no plans of creating an AgileBOK since Agile is such a robust framework that is very dynamic and ever changing. We are working with IEEE on a Software Extension to the PMBOK Guide over the next couple of years and will include references to Agile there.

Q: Will PMI be producing a PMI-ACP^SM certification study guide?
A: No, PMI has published the reference list of recommended reading books for the exam and has never produced a study guide book for its own exams. They rely on their approved REPs to provide this education and training.

Q: What changes will happen in Dec 2011 to this certification? when will the final version be out?
A: We will not make changes to the examination outline guide itself, only to the questions based on the feedback we’re getting from the Agile Community of Practice and others on the exam. We think it will be the end of January before the final changes are incorporated into the exam itself.

Q: How does someone earn the 21 Contact Hours required for the certification? do webinars count?
A:  Please refer to the PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Handbook to understand what qualifies for Contact Hours. Search for the word ‘contact hours’. Webinars usually count towards PDUs but not towards contact hours. The training session should have some type of assessment at the end or specify a timeline of when the assessment needs to be completed by. Self study usually doesn’t count towards the 21 Contact Hours. Your CSM training class would count towards the 21 Contact Hours in addition to other Agile related training provided by REPs, PMI Chapters and other providers listed in the handbook.

————————- End of Interview with Rory ——————————–

Resources to Help You Prepare for YOUR PMI-ACP ^SM Exam:

• Upcoming PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Exam Prep On-site and Virtual Workshops (21 Contact Hours)
• Join the PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Study Group on LinkedIn (dedicated to discussing this exam, feel free to post your questions or feedback after taking the exam)
• Join the PMI Agile Community of Practice (lots of great Agile information and webinars by experts and community members)
• Read my popular PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Detailed Exam Study Tips
• Join the PMI Learning and Education Community of Practice (I’m the Agile Expert for this community and host a ‘Transforming to Agile’ series of monthly webinars)
• http://www.AgileExams.com has created a great online test practice website with great reviews. We include access for FREE in our PMI-ACP^SM certification courses!

Sally Elatta – President Enterprise Coach & Trainer Agile Transformation Inc.

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building lean high performing collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I am the Agile Expert for the PMI Learning, Education and Development (LEAD) community of practice and I host a popular Agile webinar series and blogs on transforming to Agile. Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta

PMI and PMP are registered marks of Project Management Institute, Inc., and PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) and PMI-ACP are service marks of Project Management Institute, Inc.

PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Exam Prep Online Training

Friends, we’re really excited to share that our recent PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Prep online training was a great success! Bryan Tew (Master Trainer!) just delivered this course and we decided to break it up to 4 days of around 5.25 hours per day so that participants could still get ‘some’ work done. Online courses are never the same as in person courses but we had just received lots of interest and we’re happy this pilot turned out excellent and valuable for our students! We also decided to give the participants access to recorded version for a few days to help them review what was covered which was requested by the participants themselves. Checkout our current PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Prep Training Schedule

Here is some feedback from the students who just attended (we’re not bragging, just excited )

Though the training was about  5hrs each day, at the end of the day it really did not feel that strenuous. The course was well planned and very well organized. The class I sat in was a online-virtual class, and was well suited.  Sreerama N

PMI-ACP referred to a total of 11 books. I did buy them all, and had them for a while. Compared to the money on all those books (and of course, I did not read them all yet), the money I spent on the training was justified. Just four days of training helped raise my practice test scores. I feel confident that using the strategies given by Bryan Tew, I should put a decent performance in the real exam. Sreerama N

Deep knowledge of the instructor good practice high number of references – Juan M

Amazing training even with the challenges of the distributed team. Bryan managed to help us all to take full advantage of it. – Juan M

I was impressed by the different tools used during the class GoogleDoc, online planning poker estimate, drawings. – Luigi R.

Right pace, lot of real world examples and workshops. Venkat G.

The instructor was very good, understood and explained all the Agile Methodologies, and practices. This will certainly help me pass the exam. Sheila D.

Updated, from our January 2012 class:

The course was excellent.  Bryan is an impressive facilitator and we had lively chats among participants (in 3 continents).  Peter O.

Just a quick update…class is amazing – Bryan is doing a great job, content is awesome, very good experience.  Glenn B.

So are YOU considering trying out an online PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Exam Prep course yourself? Checkout our schedule for our upcoming courses or let us know if you’d like us to deliver a course at your location. We travel all over the world and love it!

Looking to connect with others preparing for their exam? Join the active PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Linkedin Study Group.

 

The Agile Transformation Team

PMI and PMP are registered marks of Project Management Institute, Inc., and PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) and PMI-ACP are service marks of Project Management Institute, Inc.

 

 

Agile Idea Qualification and Project Initiation

I just delivered an Agile Idea Qualification and Project Initiation webinar and would love to hear your feedback on it! I shared some sample Kanban walls you can use for these stages. The webinar is below. Please let me know what you think? If you like these then I would be happy to share more
URL to download the presentation and cheat sheets: www.TinyUrl.com/agiletraining

 

 
Also Watch: Transforming to an Agile PMO (for the PMI PMO Community of Practice)
Gartner analysts have reported that 80% of all Software Development projects will be moving to Agile methods in the next few years. PMI has also recently launched its PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)^SM offering as a response to the increase in Agile adoption. So what does this all mean to your PMO? Through this webinar I will provide a quick overview of Agile methods, then jump into how you can transition your PMO to support Agile Development and use some new Agile and Lean techniques for Idea Qualification, Project Initiation and Portfolio Management. Whether you are moving to Agile or not, you will definitely learn some real world tips to help you improve your current PMO activities!

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building lean high performing collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I am the Agile Expert for the PMI Learning, Education and Development (LEAD) community of practice and I host a popular Agile webinar series and blogs on transforming to Agile. New PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)SM Exam Prep Workshops! Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) ^SM Certification Study Tips

Agile Methods:

• Review the Agile Values and Principles thoroughly.
• Learn Scrum thoroughly! (Ken’s Agile Project Management with Scrum is the recommended book for this)
  • Understand the key roles and what they do.
  • Understand the Scrum artifacts such as product backlog and burn down charts. Know what they are, why we use them and how to analyze the charts.
  • Understand the Scrum meetings such as Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Retrospective very well. You should know what happens in each of these meetings.
  • Learn and understand the basic Scrum Rules. For example, how do we handle a new requirement/story that the Product Owner introduces in the middle of a Sprint? Who can speak during the daily Scrum?
• XP (eXtreme Programming) – (James Shore’s Art of Agile Development is the recommended book)
  • Really understand the XP roles and who does what.
  • Understand the various XP practices. For example
  • Understand Test Driven Development, how it works and its value.
  • Understand Continuous Integration, how it works and its value.
• Lean  (Alan Shalloway’s Lean-Agile Software Development is the recommended book to read)
  • Understand the History of Lean and the Lean Software Development Principles
  • What is Lean Portfolio Management and what is the value of it to the organization?
  • Value Stream Mapping,  How to do it Video
  • Understand the basics of Kanban (what is it? can you mix it with other Agile methods? how prescriptive is it? what is WIP? how does the Kanban wall help us optimize our process flow?..)
• Learn the other Agile methods and what they are about. (Crystal, FDD, DSDM ..)

Osmotic Communication :

• Alistair Cockburn (author of Agile Software Development – The Cooperative Game) describes this as the information that flows in the background hearing of teams that are co-located so they pick up relevant information, as though by osmosis.
• When someone asks a questions then others can tune in or out and contribute to the conversation. This is an example of rapid and rich feedback that has high value with little structure. It can help the team identify and address errors, issues and risks early on the project.

Servant Leadership:

• Leaders understand that their role is to empower the team, help them make their own decisions, help them become self organizing and not use command and control to direct them. This is the hardest transition initially for traditional project managers (and leaders) if they were used to a command and control style of managing.
• The focus of servant leaders is the growth and empowerment of the people instead of the management of the tasks. Learn how you can transition to being the team’s coach, mentor and facilitator instead of their problem solver.
• I’m really passionate about this topic so we have a full 2 day course just on this subject!

Agile Risk Management:

Agile Planning and Estimation:

Communications Management:

• Planning: Identifying who you need to communicate to (Team members, Sponsor, Stakeholders) and what you need to communicate to them (Project and Team Charters, Release Plan, Iteration planning, daily standup, demo and retrospective meeting dates/location, team velocity, team task board or team room location, project portal site, etc.)
• Stakeholder Management: Setting clear expectations from the very start with your stakeholders on what information they need, how and when they should engage with the team and how frequently (time commitment needed for success), how do we communicate changes in scope/time/schedule to them, how do we communicate project risk.
• Performance Reporting and Visible Information Radiators: Understanding what information radiators are all about and why we use them, how to leverage their power even for distributed teams, how we track and report performance through burn up/burn down charts at the iteration level and at the release level. How we can analyze the various charts and understand if things are going well or not and respond quickly to what we’re seeing.

Project and Quality Standards:

• Quality is collectively owned by the team and no longer the sole responsibility of the testing team. The testers, analysts and developers all collaborate early on to define the quality measures for their project.
• Quality planning in Agile happens as part of the team’s Release Planning, Iteration Planning and daily planning activities.
• The team along with the product owner develops their ‘Definition of Done’ that provides clear guidance for when a ‘story’ is done.
• This could also be defined at various other levels, for example we could have a ‘Release  definition of Done’ and a ‘Project definition of Done’. The story definition of Done would contain the product owner’s expectations for quality and the team’s standards. For example, a team could decide a story is Done when:
  • There are no outstanding open defects/issues.
  • The code has been checked in to source control and tagged correctly.
  • Unit testing has passed with x% code coverage.
  • ‘Just Enough’ documentation has been published.
  • All acceptance tests have passed.
  • Code has been deployed to QA/Test server.
  • Tester has ran automated tests with no issues.
• If the company has specific standards that need to be followed such as coding, security and architectural standards then the team may initially build consensus around them and inspect them during design and code review sessions or add them to their definition of Done.

Business Case Development:

• I think what is needed to understand here is how an Agile business case may differ from traditional business case development. An Agile Business Case could still be born during the traditional ‘Initiation’ phase which may also be referred to as ‘Visioning’ or ‘Feasibility’ in Agile and needs to have  ‘Just Enough’ or ‘Barely Sufficient’ analysis as Alistair Cockburn would say.
• An Agile business case may use techniques such as ‘Design the Box’ for defining the vision and objectives and should also include very clear conditions of satisfaction and measures for success (also called Project Level Definition of Done).
• High level requirements, a high level roadmap along with high level estimates could be submitted with the knowledge that after execution of a few iterations these estimates will be continuously updated to reflect the team’s new knowledge and actual velocity.

Applying New Agile Practices:

• Understanding how to effectively introduce Agile practices to a team through:
• Initial education on the Agile values, principles and drivers behind the need for this change in mindset.
• Gaining the teams buy-in for piloting the new practices by understanding how they address existing pain points or solve business problems.
• Using Adaptive Leadership to continuously inspect and adapt the practices after piloting them and defining a strategy for rolling them out to the larger organization.
• Defining Project and Team Charters to capture the team values and norms.

Organization and Regulatory Compliance:

• Understanding how an Agile team could address with organizational compliance related issues by using a higher body such as an Agile PMO to negotiate reasonable processes that satisfy both the needs of the team and the business instead of being the enforcer who dictates these processes with no input from the team.
• Teams need to work with their auditors to find the ‘right’ level of documentation that is actually needed to pass regulatory compliance and not just assume existing documents and processes that have been established for years cannot be improved to be more effective and efficient.

Innovation Games:

• You should know what innovation games are about (created by Luke Hohmann), why we use them and know the top ones such as Product Box (used during visioning) and Buy a Feature (used for prioritizing).

Control Limits:

• My thought is that this could be referring to the comparison between traditional Six Sigma ‘Defined Process Control’ where control limits are defined for product quality and defects (for example the production must yield less than 3.4 errors in one million) and Agile/Scrum which uses ‘Empirical Process Control’. Ken Shwaber argues that software is too complex to expect defects to be defined within specific error limits. However, Deming’s Plan-DO-Check-ACT (PDCA) cycle is well received in Agile as a form of inspect and adapt cycle.

Earned Value Management (EVM):

• I would read this great article by my colleague Mike Griffiths: Agile Earned Value Management (EVM)
• This is also another short and great read on Agile EVM by Tamara Sulaiman

Prepare for YOUR PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) ^SM Certification Exam:

• Upcoming PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Exam Prep On-site and Virtual Workshops (21 PDUs) – Learn from top Agile Practitioners and Experts!
• Join the PMI-ACP Study Group on LinkedIn (dedicated to discussing this exam, feel free to post your questions or feedback after taking the exam)
• Join the PMI Agile Community of Practice (lots of great Agile information and webinars by experts and community members)
• Join the PMI Learning and Education Community of Practice (I’m the Agile Expert for this community and host a ‘Transforming to Agile’ series of monthly webinars and blogs that are pretty popular, hope you can attend the next one on Agile Idea Qualification and Project Initiation)

Sally Elatta – President Enterprise Coach & Trainer http://agiletraining.com/

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building lean high performing collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I am the Agile Expert for the PMI Learning, Education and Development (LEAD) community of practice and I host a popular Agile webinar series and blogs on transforming to Agile. New PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) SM Certification Exam Prep Workshops! Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta

My PMI-ACP ^SM Certification Exam Retrospective

What Worked Well

• I thought the coverage of all the various Agile methods (Scrum, XP, Lean and Kanban) was well spread out.  There are many more questions on Scrum and XP than I had initially anticipated but I thought they were good to have.
• I liked the fact that the exam had several questions on team dynamics, empowerment and collaboration. Questions around creating high performance teams, osmotic communication, moving out of command and control to Servant Leadership and team empowerment were all great to see.
• There were several questions on the four Agile Values, in addition to comparisons of the Agile Values and Principles with the Lean Principles which was great because it emphasized how strong these two are joined.
• I particularly enjoyed (and had several smiles and giggles during the test) some of the tricky options that seemed very logical but would not align with the spirit of Agile.
• I liked the fact that Lean Portfolio Management was included but not to an advanced degree. You basically needed to know what Lean Portfolio Management was, understand its value to the business and understand what a Value Stream Map provides for you.

What Needs Improvement

• There were some inconsistencies that (I believe) were a result of the different terminology used between the recommended reference books. For example, you will see ScrumMaster, Agile Project Manager, Agile Leader and the XP Coach all being used. I’m ok with ScrumMaster used in the context of Scrum and Coach used in the context of XP questions, but I think Agile Project Manager and Agile Leader will be confusing so picking a common ‘generic’ Agile term might be useful.
• Some questions were confusing because they were not well worded and taken out of a specific chapter in a book. For example, a question around ‘Agile Project  Values are best implemented when specified by the …’.  My first reaction to the word ‘Project Values’ was project ROI which would point to the Product Owner, but then I thought maybe they mean the Team Values and norms? Oh, wait maybe Project Values are the project estimates?? Upon the review of the recommended books, it was clear this was related to Agile Team Values and norms.
• I was puzzled by the reference to some techniques such as Monte Carlo Analysis, the Parato Rule, ‘the Risk Audit Meeting’ only because there were several questions on them and for some reason I didn’t see them (or perhaps missed them) in the exam guide. They are also not standard terms we use all the time so it caught me by surprise even though I managed to get the right answer by process of elimination. If we are going to keep them (or perhaps reduce the number of questions on them) then we just need to refer to them in the exam guide.

Prepare for YOUR exam:

Sally Elatta – President Enterprise Coach & Trainer http://agiletraining.com/

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building highly engaged collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I am the Agile Expert for the PMI Learning, Education and Development (LEAD) community of practice and I host a popular webinar series and blogs on transforming to Agile. New PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) SM Certification Exam Prep Workshop! Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta

The Four Levels of Agile Requirements

Don’t you just love the word ‘Requirements’? It’s just so clear isn’t it – NOT! Have you ever heard your business customer say ‘I’ve already given you my requirements’ and the team then says ‘We haven’t received clear or detailed  requirements’? the other side to this is when the team tells the customer ‘You are giving us too much details, don’t tell us where the button goes on the screen, just tell us what you want’.  No wonder we have so many requirements related issues on our projects!

During one of my previous PMI webinars we talked about  Agile Requirements – Breaking Down EPICs and Prioritizing.  I’ll take a stab through this blog at summarizing the levels of Agile (and frankly non Agile) requirements and how you can use a four step process for gathering them.

First, let’s start with the picture below. The picture shows 4 levels of requirements and also on the left is the 4 step process for gathering requirements.

Visioning

: This is the initial step of gathering requirements. The goal is to help identify all the Themes and some features desired. This exercise begins to define the scope of what is expected.

Brainstorming

: The goal of this step is to identify all the features and stories desired. The key here is Breadth First, Depth Later. So instead of discussing the details of each feature and story, our main goal is to FIND all the features and stories.

Breakdown

: The goal of this step to breakdown and slice the stories that are still too large (EPICs) into smaller chunks. You probably have already done a lot of slicing during brainstorming but as you comb your backlog, the team will realize that some stories are still too large to be completed within an iteration (usually 1-4 weeks). Slicing stories is an art and I will dedicate an entire blog to it!

Deep Dive

: This is the step everyone wants to jump into right away! Yes, finally let’s talk about the details. What will be on the screen, what are the exact business rules and how will we test them, what will the detailed process look like, what are the tasks we need to get done to complete this story. Jumping into this level of detail upfront during the initial phases is one of the main reasons contributing to scope creep later during the project.

Suppose we are developing a system for an online job posting site OnStopJobs.com. Here is an example of what the requirements could look like based on the levels above:

1.     Employer Area – Theme

a.     Manage Jobs – Feature

1.As an employer I want to post a job so others can find it. Story

2.As an employer I want to modify a job posting so it is correct. Story

3.As an employer I want view a list of my open job postings so I can analyze them.  Story

4.As an employer I want to expire a job posting so no one can apply. Story

b.     Manage Applicants

1.As an employer I want to view the list of recent applicants so I can respond to them.

2.As an employer I want to view the list of applicants for a specific job positing so I can qualify them.

3.As an employer I want to select the top candidates so I can interview them.

You should gather the levels above (Themes, Features, Stories) upfront when you are planning out your release, especially if you have the raditional projects with begin and end dates. We usually spend more effort on the stories that are coming up in the next few iterations or the next release.

The Deep Dive is where the main difference lies between Agile and Waterfall. Traditional teams would gather this very detailed information upfront for ALL the stories on the backlog, where Agile teams will gather these details Just In Time for the next stories, which is one or two iterations before that story needs to be DONE.

Here is an example of what the details could look like for this selected story:
“As an employer I want to post a job so others can find it.”.

Acceptance Criteria/Tests
(How will we know when we’re done):

1.     UAT1 – Verify that only an authorized user with a valid employer account can post a job.

2.     UAT2 – Verify that a duplicate job posting cannot be entered.

3.     UAT3 – Verify that the posting date is past today’s date.

4.     UAT4 –Verify that the positing expiration date within 90 days.

5.     UAT5 – Verify that the screen fields pass our standard field format rules.

6.     UAT6 – Verify that all required fields are entered.

Acceptance criteria are the ‘details’ of the story and they are considered primary requirements in Agile. We gather them upfront before any development begins.

Sample Tasks (The work we need to do to get this done):

1. Create a database tables to store the job posting details.

2. Design and build the screen for job posting.

3. Develop the logic for UAT1 to pass.

4. Document/record the on page video help for the job posting page.

5. Perform user acceptance testing.

6. Deploy the code to the test environment.

7. ….. others..

UI Prototype/Wireframe and Activity Diagrams:
These could be hand drawn sketches of the screen or the process steps involved for the system to accomplish the process defined.

Quiz Time – What is What?

Would you like to test your skills and ability to differentiate between the various levels of requirements? Take a look at the list of requirements’ below and jot down your thoughts on if each item is a Theme, Feature, Story or the Details of a story. I’ve purposely made them tricky and some of them could have two answers depending on the context you define. I will share the answers in my next blog so stay tuned!

a)     We need the ability to filter our reports by date and group #.

b)     We want to manage user access to the site and limit who has access to what.

c)     We want to make sure that only Managers can access the salary data.

d)     We want customers to pay using credit cards online.

e)     We want to verify that discover card payments are not allowed.

f)      We want scheduled and ad hoc reporting.

Please post a comment or question below and share with us your own experience and challenges with requirements. Do the levels above make sense? Do you see value in organizing requirements this way? Please share any tips you have with managing the levels of requirements.

Sally Elatta – President Enterprise Coach & Trainer http://agiletraining.com/

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building highly engaged collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I have an interesting mix of technical background as a software Architect in addition to business skills that help me connect with audiences at various levels. My goal is to transform individuals, teams and organizations to doing what they do better.  New PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) SM Certification Exam Prep Workshop! Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta Project Manager Agile LearningRoadmap

A Journey Through the Agile Lifecycle

My last PMI webinar was on the ‘Journey Through an Agile/Scrum Project Lifecycle’ and I wanted to summarize some of the key points discussed. If you haven’t attended then feel free to watch the recorded version (requires PMI membership).

To understand the Agile Lifecycle, we’ll analyze the diagram below and walk through the key activities of each step.

Step	Goal	Common Activities
Release Planning	Perform ‘Just Enough’ planning for the project so that we have a clear Backlog of requirements and a ‘rough’ plan of iterations needed to accomplish our goal.	Create the backlog of functional and non-functional features and stories Perform Roadmap and Release level prioritization Identify feature dependency/sequencing Size each story Define the team’s ‘Done’ Estimate initial velocity Identify additional iterations/sprints Develop initial Release Plan Develop initial Cost Estimates
Iteration 0	Build the foundation with ‘Just Enough’ deliverables needed to make Iteration 1 Demo/Review successful.	Develop high level architecture diagrams Develop high level data models Develop high level process diagrams Develop high level look and feel designs/wireframes Install or upgrade software Install or configure Dev and Testing servers Team Training (Business, Agile, Technical) Collaboration Room/Environment Setup Start on Proof of Concept spikes Pre-Planning for Iteration 1
Execution/Development Iterations	Deliver high value and high quality working software that is customer tested and accepted in small chunks. Deliverables must be Potentially Shippable.	Start with an Iteration Planning meeting Identify top stories, breakdown tasks, commit Create team task board or visual electronic wall Have a Daily Standup, track and resolve impediments Pre-Planning for the next Iteration, Backlog Grooming Design and Code Reviews Test Driven Development and XP Best Practices Automated Testing User Acceptance Testing Iteration Review/Demo, Retrospective
Pre-Release	Prepare to move the ‘Done’ features to production. Validate quality of features.	Final regression, integration and end to end testing Final user acceptance and sign off User Training, rollout of new processes Help Documentation finalization Training for support team Release notes
Production	Verify production implementation was successful and that software/deliverables are working as expected.	Operate and support the system with live users Track production issues Transition to support team

 

1. Not all projects are the same. If your project is a small project that focuses on continuously delivering on smaller enhancements and support requests then you may not need much or any of Release Planning and Iteration 0. However, many of the projects we’ve been on have needed ‘just enough’ of these two important steps. Skipping these entirely usually results in many impediments throughout the rest of the iterations.
2. Many Agile/Scrum teams would prefer a ‘Product Development’ type of approach in contrast with a ‘Project’ approach that has a begin and end date and where teams are built then disbanded after each project. Of course, after understanding Agile you will see why keeping teams stable and having continuous flow of value would be to your advantage. I believe you could use the lifecycle above for either types of approaches with minor adjustments based on project type.
3. The steps above do not include the Project Initiation/Visioning phase which happens before Release Planning. We will cover this in later webinars and blogs.
4. Some teams don’t see a need for Iteration 0. They feel that once you have done a bit of planning then you can begin to iterate and the initial iterations/sprints will need to cover the foundation type work anyway (hence having an Iteration 0 but not really calling it out as such). So don’t get caught up in terminology, the important thing is that you’ve planned for critical foundation items needed ahead of time.

During our next webinar we will cover Agile Requirements – Breaking Down EPICs and Prioritizing. Hope you can join us! If not, look for the recorded version online.

Please post a comment or question below and share with us your own experience with the Agile lifecycle, do the steps above make sense? Have you experienced them on your projects? What tips do you have for the community members?

Sally Elatta http://agiletraining.com/

About Me: I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about helping organizations move towards building highly engaged collaborative teams that can deliver value predictably. I like to find practical solutions to solve real problems and use a combination of Agile, Scrum, Lean, Soft Skills and Servant Leadership to reach the desired target. I have an interesting mix of technical background as a software Architect in addition to business skills that help me connect with audiences at various levels. My goal is to transform individuals, teams and organizations to doing what they do better. Full profile/bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/elatta View Your Learning Road map by Role

 

 

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) ^SM Certification Live Webinar Interview

As I mentioned in my recent post, I will be hosting Rory McCorkle, the Product Owner for the new PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)^SM Certification, on a live webinar on March 17^th at 12pm EST on the Learning and Education CoP. We will also have a live twitter chat going under the #pmiagilecert tag so be sure to follow the conversation or tweet your questions. This is our first time doing a live webinar/twitter chat combination so we hope it will serve the purpose of engaging both the PMI and Agile community members.

Please post here any additional questions you are interested in asking Rory about this certification. My previous post has the ones he answered for us but I’m collecting questions for the upcoming webinar.

-Sally

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