Agile Carpentry

LeSS with Gene and James: Multi-Team Refinement


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For so many companies, inability to estimate, forecast, budget, and manage expectations of clients, users, and management is a big issue.  Below, are some of the most commonly heard concerns: 

  • Our teams cannot accurately estimate work.
  • Our teams are not stable and not dedicated. Capacity is unpredictable.
  • Not everyone is cross-functional and everyone does their own work. What is the point of estimating together?
  • Our teams get confused with historical Velocity-driven planning vs. Capacity-driven planning. When to use what and why? 
  • Our teams have hard dependencies on other teams. Some resources are shared. What can we do? 
  • Our estimation and metrics get so-so fudged, as they roll up through multiple organizational layers to the top. 
  • Our organization is fractal: one PO per one team, each team works in a silo. We cannot “standardize” estimation. 
  • Individual teams are more or less OK, with estimation, but how to we "normalize" estimation across multiple teams? 
  • How do we "scale estimation", so that our sr. management can get a sense of how much work we have? 
  • When is the best time to estimate? How should we provide estimates? 
  • How can we effectively estimate with many developers not be co-located? 
  • When and where is knowledge about the estimated work being used?  
  • Let’s talk about how most of these problems can be addressed in Large Scale Scrum. Instead of implying that LeSS is a silver bullet or blanket solution to everything, lets focus on specific dynamics of LeSS, with respect to:  

    • Specifics of LeSS product group design 
    • Intimate synergy between teams 
    • Roles & responsibilities, artifacts & events  
    • This will provide insight on WHY estimation and forecasting by LeSS product group (e.g. 50 developers) would be more reliable than the same, done by e.g. 50 developers of a traditionally-designed organization.  

      Relevant Links: 

      Learn @ James: https://agilecarpentry.com/

      Learn @ Gene:  https://www.keystepstosuccess.com/

      #lessworks #less #largescalescrum #agile


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      Agile CarpentryBy James