Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery
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MailMy parents are coming to visit this weekend and that is usually preceded by a mad frenzy of tidying the house! I could work room by room through the house until the whole house is tidy, but I know time is tight.
Starting with the bedrooms might result in the downstairs loo not getting cleaned if I run out of time, and I don't want to get caught short. So without thinking I have a mental backlog of cleaning and tidying stories, I have roughly estimated how long they will take and thought through what the relative benefits are.
I have coffee milestones planned for key deliveries in my cleaning plan, and expect to re-prioritise every 20 mins on the morning of their arrival based on my current rate of progress. I have worked out my minimum delivery and have broken down my cleaning stories in a way that doesn't require the whole of a room to be tidy before I have delivered something of value! Most importantly is the need to respond to the unexpected change in arrival time, they might turn up 30 mins early, or my kids might delay my expected progress, but I will make sure I do the most important things first and stop to put the kettle on when they give me the five minute warning! Wish me luck!
I'm an experienced Agile project manager and am particularly interested in governance and contractual issues. I have a hands on approach and have been running and coaching Agile teams since the late 90’s.
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I get asked the question ‘who is your favourite 19th century Prussian Field Marshal’ quite a lot, as I suspect you do as well. There are of course several great contenders for this title, but my vote has to go Helmuth Von Moltke the Elder. Why? Because of his contribution to the concept of dynamic planning! Trying to convince people that planning is a continuous and never ending process and not something that’s completed at the start of a project is a constant challenge for me and I will grab any support I can get.
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Comments
15 Sep 2011 09:59
or you have a wife who doesn't believe in prioritising in case you run out of time and insists you both stop up for as long as it takes the night before to make sure everything gets done ....
Login to post comments15 Sep 2011 13:55
Surely with a properley resourced planned maintenance schedule, which should have been included as one of the original project "home" deliverables and monies allocated/secured from the annual "home" budget, then the house shouldn't get into such a state of untidiness?
However I do realise that resources are nearly always diverted away from maintenance onto other off-spec requirements, i.e. Wonderstuff concerts, off-spring taxi services, etc. which, apart from the former, would not have been included in any great detail in the original plans.
At the end of the day it's down to the same old problem - end user error :-)
Login to post comments15 Sep 2011 18:09
Also raises an interesting question about who's the customer here - the one you need to build trust with for the agile approach to development. Is it really the parents coming to visit - who don't care about it being spotless as the key deliverable is providing access to resource (you and the grandchildren) in a timely manner - or is it the spouse/business partner who has a longer term reputation for cleanliness to up-hold that supercedes any individual client visit requirements.
Login to post comments15 Sep 2011 18:18
Mark, interesting observation! I hadn't thought about who my real customer was, but I think you may be right!
John, I think you know me too well!
Login to post comments15 Sep 2011 19:07
Downstairs loo and their room. If your mum is anything like mine, she'll give the place a clean when she arrives.
Login to post comments15 Sep 2011 19:21
Karen, yes, I think you get prioritisation! Kitchen next!
Login to post comments15 Sep 2011 21:30
Kitchen story is too large. Suggest the following with extra resource (mum) for story 3.4 to complete the objective of cleaning the kitchen.
3.1 Prepare kitchen sufficiently for cooking meal
3.2 Cook meal
3.3 Eat meal
3.4 Wash up and tidy kitchen.
Note the advantage of eating the meal in story 3.3 to provide energy for 3.4 :-))
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