- Present the thought process and mechanisms for product portfolio management that allow the organization to always be building on those business capabilities that will produce the greatest value
- Give product champions an understanding of how to maximize the return on investment for their software projects
- Give managers of agile projects an understanding of the Agile process
- Prepare analysts, leads, developers and testers for doing Agile projects
- Emphasize the need for driving Agile projects from business needs
- Create a focus in the development team towards delivering high value, high quality software in a sustainable manner
This course answers the question – “how do we do high-level release planning on Agile projects across an Enterprise?” It illustrates release planning at both the project level as well as how to coordinate releases of related products. While Agile has demonstrated an ability to bring high quality software products to market faster than legacy methods, many organizations have had difficulty with Agile’s bottom-up approach. By incorporating the Lean principle of “optimize the whole” with “deliver fast” participants learn how to implement business driven software development, a top-down planning approach that enables Agile teams to deliver higher quality product fast and with lower cost.
The course is designed within the context of Lean Software Development. This enables Agile planning to scale to the Enterprise because it enables Agile practitioners to keep the big picture in mind while working on the small pieces. It deals with the following important questions:
- How do I identify those business capabilities which will generate the greatest return for my company?
- How do I estimate the value and cost of these capabilities?
- How can I create a release plan for building these?
- How can I coordinate multiple release plans across related projects?
- How do I define and manage interim releases for integration and alpha testing?
- How do I break down these capabilities into smaller, more manageable pieces?
- How do I manage my analysis over the life of the project?
- How does agile analysis affect architecture?
Agile analysis has brought about new challenges and new opportunities. Agile has proven to be an improvement at the project level over old-school techniques of heavy use-cases or significant up-front analysis. But expanding Agile to the Enterprise has been somewhat problematic because of agile’s historical bottom up approach of creating release plans from stories or Epics.
This course focuses on uncovering and managing the customers’ needs of the products being built by the enterprise. It teaches how to discover these business capabilities in an Agile manner. It goes beyond the process of pulling out stories as they are encountered and it ties them together into releases. It drives from the business need and by doing so, it creates a big picture view which is missing from most Agile endeavors.
This course blends concepts of Lean Software Development and Agile Analysis while incorporating proven methods to plan according to the business needs. When done as an on-site course participants work on their own products. If the course is taken towards the beginning of an actual project, participants will actually develop real release plans during the course.
Product managers, product owners, directors, managers, team leaders, architects, business analysts, and project managers. Also useful for C-level executives and analysts.
