Unlocking Agile's Missed Potential
About this book
UNLOCKING AGILE'S MISSED POTENTIAL
Agile has not delivered on its promises. The business side expected faster time to market, but they still experience the long delays of bloated releases. Engineers thought they would be given time to build the product right the first time, but they are rushed under pressure to deliver new features within impossible schedules. What went wrong?
The culprit is feature-based waterfall release planning perpetuated in a vain attempt to achieve business predictability. Agile didn't address the business need for multi-year financial predictability. The Agile community's answer was the naïve response, "The business needs to be more Agile." Waterfall release planning with fixed schedules undercuts a basic tenet of Agile development – the need to adjust content delivered within a timebox to account for evolving requirements and incorporation of feedback. Agile without flexible content is not Agile.
This book introduces a novel solution that enables product teams to deliver higher value within shorter cycle times while meeting the predictability needs of the business. Organizations today want product teams that break down walls between product management and engineering to achieve schedule and financial objectives. Until now they haven't had a way to implement product teams within the rigid constraints of traditional organizational structures.
The Investment planning approach described in this book supports small development increments planned and developed by product teams aligned by common schedule and financial goals. It uses Cost of Delay principles to prioritize work with the highest value and shortest cycle times. Investments provide a vehicle for collaboration and innovation and fulfill the promise of highly motivated self-directed Agile development teams.
This book is for engineers, product managers and project managers who want to finally do Agile the way it was envisioned. This book is also for leaders who want to build high-performance teams around the inherent motivational environment of Agile when done right.
Foreword by Steve McConnell, author of More Effective Agile: A Roadmap for Software Leaders (Construx Press, 2019).
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Author Biography
- Foreword
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Persistence of Waterfall Planning
- Chapter 2 Why Agile Has Struggled
- Chapter 3 Embracing Software Development Variance
- Chapter 4 Cost of Delay
- Chapter 5 Investment Fundamentals
- Chapter 6 Maximizing Investment Value
- Chapter 7 Planning High‐Value Investment Features
- Chapter 8 Releasing Investments
- Chapter 9 Meeting Investment Targets
- Chapter 10 Investment Planning Template
- Chapter 11 Managing the Agile Roadmap
- Chapter 12 Maximizing Investment Development Productivity
- Chapter 13 Motivating Agile Teams
- Chapter 14 Innovating with Investments
- Chapter 15 AccuWiz Gets It Together
- Chapter 16 Getting It Together in Your Company: A Practical Guide
- Appendix A General Cost of Delay Formula
- Appendix B Investment Income Profile Forecasts
- Appendix C Release Cycle Productivity Formula
- Appendix D Rework and Productivity
- Appendix E Innovation Behavior Survey
- Glossary
- Index
- EULA
