agile

The product owner role on agile projects is critical to the team and the project. The product owner's influence, performance, and behavior can set the stage for smooth sailing—or sink a project. In this article, Anupam Kundu shares two different product owner experiences to drive home the argument how their behaviors and practices can shape organizational culture—specifically for new product development and start-ups.

Looking for an agile refresher? Here, Jurgen Appelo applies his seven dimensions of software projects—people, functionality, quality, tools, time, value, and process—to what he believes are the fundamentals of agile. And, for those who might disagree, he suggests an eighth dimension that brings its own value to agile: conflict.

When Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener facilitated a game called The Backlog Is in the Eye of the Beholder for the Boston chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis, both the players and the facilitators learned some important lessons in organizing a project requirements backlog. In this article, they describe the game and what it revealed, including the value of truly knowing your stakeholders.

Karl Scotland explains that viewing kanban as a systemic approach leads to systems thinking. Systems can be thought of as being made up of elements, which interact to meet a purpose. They are more than the sum of the parts, and the system’s purpose is crucial in determining the system’s behavior.