Inside Product
Just in time product management resources
Following is an excerpt from How To Be An Agile Business Analyst, a book that explores how to apply your business analysis skills in an agile manner so that your team solves the right problems with the right solutions. Get the book now to uncover ways to add value to your organization, make your team …
I recently declared that agile transformations aren’t the answer for product development, so why am I exploring who in the organization should instigate an agile adoption? Because there are people in internal product situations who are still in the midst of an agile transformation or are staring down the barrel of another agile transformation (the …
“What is the Role of a Business Analyst in Agile?”I see this question asked quite a bit. I’d like to suggest that rewording the question may be a bit more instructive. Instead of wondering what is the role of a business analyst in agile, you may want to ask the question “how can people who …
Agile2015 is next week in Washington DC so I thought I’d share some ideas for getting the most out of the conference. I shared my 5 tips for getting the most out of the Agile Conference last year (they all still apply) so I thought I’d provide pointers to others thoughts on attending conferences and …
Feedback is an important ingredient to successful projects. One reason teams use iterative approaches, either time boxed sprints or single piece flow, is that they have the opportunity to get frequent and rapid feedback. A few recent experiences have inspired me to think a bit about how helpful feedback can be and some subtle aspects …
About a month ago I was honored to talk with Dave Saboe on his Mastering Business Analysis Podcast. We talked about my forthcoming (for a while now) book Beyond Requirements: Analysis with an Agile Mindset and other things analysis and agile. Thanks to Dave for having me on his podcast. Here are a variety of …
Feature Injection is a very helpful process framework created by Chris Matts that is not explicitly used as much as it probably should. I suspect the main reason it is not adopted more is because people don’t really understand what it’s all about. There are several articles and blog posts that explain feature injection, but …
I’ve attended or been involved with the Agile2014 conference almost every year since 2004 (I didn’t make the previous visit to Orlando in 2010). Through all of those experiences, I’ve learned a lot of lessons, some more painfully than others, about how to get the most out of the conference. I thought it would be …
This morning (November 22, 2013) I had the opportunity to be involved in a very unique discussion. SkillsMatter hosted the Agile Testing & BDD Exchange in London. The format of this particular conference was to have a series of sessions that featured two or more presenters teaming up to cover a particular topic. Chris Matts …
I am proud to be a part of a new program in the Agile Alliance – Analysis and Product Management in Agile that was formed with the purpose of providing a way for practitioners in the business analysis and product management communities to share stories, questions, and puzzles about using those skills in an agile …
A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking of the reason why many organizations are choosing to adopt agile, and how they may be setting themselves up disappointment. When organizations approach me for help adopting agile software development, one of the first things I do is ask “Why?” The usual answer is that they …
A recent experience I had made me wonder why we come up with new labels for things and what we hope to accomplish with them. In this case, it was the idea that Chris Matts originally came up with and calls Feature Injection. What it really means is to focus analysis efforts in the opposite …
I felt the need to climb on to my soap box for a few minutes. As agile has become more and more mainstream, and risen higher in the buzzword index a fairly interesting misconception has appeared with respect to categorization. It seems that whenever agile is mentioned, authors feel this odd compunction to treat agile …
Scaling Up Excellence: Mindsets, Decisions, and Principles – Bob Sutton Tuesday at Agile 2012 started off with a keynote from Bob Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Standford University and author of Good Boss Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule. His talk centered around some thoughts for scaling up excellence based on …
Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions – Kent McDonald Monday at Agile 2012 started off with the opportunity for me to present my session Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions. I’d like to start off by thanking everyone that attended the session, provided …
These days I deliver more training classes than I attend. That’s not because I think I can’t learn anything new – I’m probably at a higher state of enlightened ignorance than I have ever been – It’s because that’s a big part of how I make a living. Thankfully, I am able to learn things …
The Scrum Master from a team I was coaching recently asked me to provide a list of 5 things, that above else the team should remember when going forward and when a coach was no longer present. I thought this list would be helpful for others to do as well, so I thought I would …
I recently saw probably the best description of agile I have ever seen, from PMNetwork, the magazine of the Project Management Institute. The article discusses the agile movement 10 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto, and interviewed four of the signatories in order to get an informed perspective. In response to a question …
“Too much fun? What’s that mean? It’s like too much money, there’s no such thing” Trace Adkins “I Ain’t Never Had Too Much Fun” On an agile project, is there possibly such a thing as too much collaboration? Collaboration is one of the cornerstones of the agile mindset. We’re reminded about it in several places: …
The end of one year and the beginning of the next brought with it a slew of posts covering the top trends for just about every field. I’ve run across three so far, all of them providing a different perspective, some I agree with, some I don’t. Regardless of my thoughts, they deserve reading: Glenn …
After an inexcusably long delay, here is another post on one of the sessions from Agile 2011. This one, Agile Thinking for Business Analysis: Going Beyond User Stories was presented by Steve Adolph & Shane Hastie. The premise of the session was that although User Stories are the “industry standard” way of documenting requirements in …
Steve Denning, a former world bank executive and author gave two presentations at Agile 2011, both of which were of extreme relevance and importance for business analysis practitioners. I was able to attend both and found in this case at least, we were able to schedule across stages in the right order. His Making the …
The role of Scrum Master is specific to Scrum. Since Scrum has become the most widely known of the agile approaches, the term Scrum Master has become a common term for the person who is acting as process guardian and facilitator for agile teams. Question: How do you feel about the BA being the daily …
Question: How do offshore resources fit into agile? Agile is heavily reliant on team communication and collaboration. The most effective means of communication is face to face, at a white board because you have the most means of transmitting information – the words, the nonverbals, and tone of voice. An ideal situation is for all …
