should in no way create a barrier between the product manager and the Agile team. It is critical that the product manager participates with the Agile team in validating each story that is being worked in the current iteration. One best practice to promote this is to encourage the product manager to write the stories for (and with) the team. The result is that the product manager has a vested interest in seeing the stories that she wrote “come to life.” Another benefit to this story connection is that the product manager gets a real sense of the effort required to complete each story which greatly aids the iteration planning sessions. Most importantly, seeing stories completed that were authored by the product manager builds trust, which is often lost in large waterfall projects as the clients see only progress against a plan and deliverables until the end of the project.
Summary
This article has highlighted some approaches to leveraging visibility as a means to keep an Agile team's efforts aligned with business goals. These simple but powerful practices can help keepenergy focused on what matters most -- rapid delivery of business value. Table 1 below provides an executive summary of these suggestions and benefits.
|
Practice |
Benefits |
|
Begin iteration planning with a vision exercise to get consensus on release and iteration goals. |
Provides principles on which all effort (and stories) should focus. Also serves to facilitate iteration review (Sprint Retrospectives). |
|
Plainly display release and iteration goals on an Information Radiator. |
Provides a constant reminder of why the Agile team is in existence. |
|
Keep a product backlog board visible and accessible to product manager's office. |
Provides brainstorming and staging areas for high priority work that feed the next iteration. |
|
Encourage the Product Manager to participate inwriting stories. |
Gives product manager a vested interest in the status of the stories and encourages him to come see status and validate the end result with the Agile team. |
|
Keep iterationsas short as possible. |
Ensures that energy is sharply focused on delivering business value. Helps constrain wasteful activities (like creating unneeded features). Makes it easier to estimate and commit. |
Table 1: Best Practice and Benefits summary
[1] see http://www.teamconceptsinc.com.
[2] see Principles behind the Agile Manifesto http://www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
[3] see “Information Radiator” Alistair Cockburn
[4] see “ The Agile-V Balanced Scorecard Metrics ”
[5] personal communications (with permission) with Mary Poppendieck, Author and Lean Software Development Expert ( http://www.poppendieck.com/)
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