scrum

Product portfolio management has become an essential discipline for all development organizations that want to achieve enterprise agility. The repeated process of selecting, sizing, and prioritizing the work to be done ensures that their development teams are delivering the most valuable products and enhancements for the business’ clients. This is required for both external clients in the case of product companies and for internal clients in the case of IT organizations. However, the subject of this paper is another, possibly even more important, reason: avoiding the overloading of the organization’s development teams which greatly lowers their efficiency.

Anupam Kundu describes an agile-enabled framework for product managers, project portfolio managers, and IT executives to develop and maintain a dynamic and flexible product roadmap. The product wing of the digital division of a publishing house adopted this collaborative framework to to charter their product roadmap and simultaneously enable their project team to see and understand the “big picture.”

One of the new roles introduced by agile software development is that of the team coach. Until agile came along, coaches were confined to the executive suite or the sports field. As with any new role, it will take awhile before it is fully understood and scoped. Agile teams can—and do—exist without the coach role, but such teams do not necessarily achieve peak performance.

There are no best practices for creating a productive, global development organization, just a few good ideas to think about and tailor around your particular objectives. Consider three universal issues every organization must grapple with to make a global agile team successful: data considerations, communications needs, and a company's agile readiness. How you handle each of these issues will vary widely, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every organization.