Agile Bites

Budgeting in an Agile world is difficult. We request money upfront but don’t know what the project contents will be or how it will turn out. This makes it hard for both internal budgeting processes and firms to quote prices. Throughput accounting is a great solution, but not every organization is ready to make that switch. But there is a way to start the transition from big batch, cost-based funding to more value-stream-based funding—using MVPs to budget.

In this episode, we're giving you an inside look into how some of our clients have taken this different approach to project budgeting that keeps one foot in the “traditional accounting world” while the other is in the “incremental delivery of value” world.

Why do we try to size user stories in software development? And how are we supposed to accurately make guesses about how long our work is going to take?

In this episode, we're breaking down a couple of popular approaches to sizing user stories and then talking about how we can forecast projects without doing any sizing at all.

What are user stories supposed to be? And who should write them? Product Owners? BAs? Devs? Users? ChatGPT?

Despite the ways many people have convoluted and complicated user stories, the answer is in the name. They are stories that users tell you about the things they need to get done and why it’s important to do them

In this episode, we're sharing with you the no-nonsense way to approach user stories so you get the information you need and users get what they need out of the product.

Blockers are something that almost all of us have to deal with at some point. When, for one reason or another, a work item gets blocked in the middle of the flow, how does your team handle it?

In this episode, we're talking about what makes an item "blocked," how to effectively represent them in your workflow, and some helpful tips to create an effective policy for blocked work items in your team.

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If your demo has become a meeting just to check off a box and cross your fingers hoping no significant changes get brought up, you're missing out on a lot of value. In this episode, we're sharing with you why we see demos as a time to gather better requirements and build trust with users.

Building software requires a balance of solid planning but also the availability to pivot and adapt. So how far should you be planning ahead for your projects?

To answer this question for your team, you have to ask yourself 1) how likely your plan is to come out wrong, and 2) how quickly your team completes work. Because the time you're using to make a plan that's likely to change anyway could be time better spent doing what needs to be done now, giving you the right information for your next move.

What does it even mean when someone says they "do Agile"? And why does "doing Agile" automatically mean using Scrum (apparently)?

There's a lot of conflation when it comes to the terms "Agile" and "Scrum." And in this episode, we're clarifying the difference between the two and how using them synonymously can limit the potential of Agility.

People often say a focus on process means you don’t care about people. But it's actually the opposite—Agile done well is really about caring for people.

When you improve processes, you are improving the lives of people. You empower them to reach their potential and feel fulfilled in working with dignity rather than dysfunction.

It's caring for people that makes us passionate about processes. That's why we work the way we work at our own software development company, and it's also why we made our #1 core value "love."

Join us for this holiday episode of Agile Bites as we spread the love of our fellow human beings through improved processes.

Imagine being able to predict with a high degree of accuracy when your team is going to complete a project. How would knowing that information change what you're doing right now?

By running Monte Carlo simulations, using completion rates from your team's past, you can peek ahead at your project's risk and the probability of possible completion dates—helping you make better decisions while you still have the chance to affect the future.

If you're not already running Monte Carlo simulations for your team, you will after listening to this episode. What are you waiting for—all the cool kids are doing it!

As an organization grows in its agility and gets rid of old models, what happens to the role of traditional project management? What do you do with the skill set, knowledge base and rich experience that our project managers bring to projects?

Before you go making your project managers into Scrum masters, we're telling you the ways that project managers bring their own value to the table within a team pursuing agility.