Yuval Yeret on Lean/Agile/Flow - Writings From The Desk Of An Agile Sparkie

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Web Name: Yuval Yeret on Lean/Agile/Flow - Writings From The Desk Of An Agile Sparkie

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Yuval Yeret on Lean/Agile/Flow Writings From The Desk Of An Agile Sparkie

A Kanban for Marketing Board Example Leave a reply

Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

(originally posted on the agilesparks blog)

Here is an example of a fairly typical Marketing Kanban board which can be useful for marketing teams that are taking their first steps towards implementing agile marketing in practice using kanban.

You can print it out and use it as a source of ideas inspiration as you evolve your own board.

It is a slightly modified version of Henrik Knibergs Kanban Kick-Start Example that he graciously shared using a creative-commons license. Why do we need a marketing version you ask? Because we find that people connect better to examples in their own domain so talking about code and development doesnt really work well with marketers Feel free to take this one and adapt it for your use and share alike! (Heres a powerpoint version you can edit)

PS Interested in learning more about how to use Kanban in Marketing? I talk quite a bit about Kanban including help marketers create their own Kanban boards in my Agile Marketing class. Next opportunity to take the class publicly is July 24-25 in Boston. This class is also available in-house where its possible to really get a Kanban board going and ready for action

SAFe Configurations Leave a reply

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

I just shared my perspective that SAFe isnt a hard-coded methodology and while it gives you a comprehensive and to some even overwhelming set of practices, there are still a lot of choices.

My old friend Sutap suggested: Would be great if you can share examples around how SAFe is not a one size fits all framework. Examples/ case studies will really help. From experience, enterprises typically have very different projects: from large programs running for years with say once in a quarter releases (say customer A) to enhancement requests released very frequently (but unsteady pipeline: say customer B) to fixed scope fixed timeline regulatory projects (customer C). Would love to hear how SAFe will handle such (and maybe many more) scenarios.

(Sutap and I worked on a scaled agile transformation in one very big enterprise where we saw all of those and more )

So here are a couple of examples/case studies, some real and some semi-real. Im not trying to explain every concept I mention here as the goal is to portray the optionality, not teach you SAFe. (If learning SAFe is your goal, come to an Implementing SAFe class or go read SAFe distilled). without further ado here goes:

When an enterprise like this implements SAFe they would probably have different Agile Release Trains (ARTs) for each one of those programs. All those ARTs would work on a Program Increment (PI) cadence like all Scrum teams work on a sprint cadence. But each of those ARTs might have a different style of PI.

The ART serving Customer A might naturally have a quarterly PI. The ART serving Customer B might have a quarterly PI or maybe a shorter 8-week PI or maybe even shorter (yes despite the fact that SAFe says 8-12 weeks! herecy!).

The ART serving Customer C might have a quarterly PI. A would release every quarter. B might release every iteration, C might release to production only every 2-3 PIs.

The Program Kanban for each of them might look different to reflect the different budgeting/analysis/governance mechanism each customer uses and the different road to production downstream from development. For one customer a 3rd party SI might have developers/testers on the feature teams with the enterprise. For another customer it might be hard to integrate the SIs people into the agile teams so a combination of internal Feature teams and a few Component teams with people from the SI might be the right approach at least initially. In other cases the SI might not even be willing/structured to collaborate at this level and would be considered a Supplier at the Value Stream level.

The infrastructure the enterprise has for customer A might be advanced enough that Continuous Integration (CI) exists and theres no need for a System Team. For Customer C it might be too early and the System team is needed both for performing the integration as well as starting to figure out how to achieve CI. Maybe in Customer C the System Team is just focusing on improving the CI and is also working on achieving Continuous Deployment capabilities (CD). In Customer B it might be the case that theres both a System Team and a DevOps enablement team each focusing on different stages in the delivery pipeline.

PI Planning itself might look different. The level of predictability needed in A is high and the backlog and ART  are stable enough to enable it so PI planning is pretty classic. In B it is not THAT important and actually much harder to achieve so PI Planning focuses more on main dependencies and projects saving significant capacity for emerging enhancements throughout execution while using PI Objectives to make sure the business and the ART are aligned on which enhancements to focus on as they emerge. In C due to the fixed scope fixed timeline the backlog SHOULD be even more stable than A and we would probably spend more time on estimating the features in the Program Backlog and building a roadmap to see whether we have a converging plan or need to invest more resources. Even earlier in this type of project, when doing the portfolio-level business case for this sort of epic we would need to do more analysis and estimation than for epics for customer A. And the features for customer B might actually not have any Program/Portfolio Epic above them.

For customer C it might make sense to have one roadmap for the 3 ARTs working on the project. For customer A it might make sense to have separate roadmaps since each ART is working with a separate business tower.

Here are a few other examples from other contexts:

How to deal with multiple small value streams sometimes it makes sense to aggregate them into one Agile Release Train (ART) especially when you want to be able to have one Program Backlog in which you prioritize those two value streams against each other and allow the ART to focus on a specific value stream/product for a while. Sometimes it makes sense to actually have a few smaller ARTs even if they are really small to the point of being mini-ARTs in case the investment/funding for each value stream is quite stable/separate and the teams working on the different products are separate as well.Should a critical core technology group that is common to multiple products be considered a separate ART? Should the different products and this core technology group be on the same Value Stream (VS) level to allow coordination in Pre/Post PI Planning? Should the products be in different VSs because thats the only connection? Should this group be split into teams that each join a different ART? Sounds like the right Agile move but on the other hand what if prioritizing what this core technology group works on across the different products is a key portfolio-level decision? if so, having a team per ART actually decentralizes control of this key resource TOO much.For some ARTs pair-working would make sense 20% of the time. For other ARTs that are currently scaling up their capacity by bringing in more people (Think the program working for customer C which just found out they need to add 3 more teams over the next PI to deliver the fixed scope project on time) they might go into pair-working 80% of the time initially to accelerate knowledge sharing and then go back to 20%.In some cases the Scrum Master will be a technical lead inside each Agile Team. In other cases they will be one of the Managers working with the ART each covering 2 teams.

Enough questions, configurations, and options? I think so

It would be great to have one size fits all for all of those. And maybe you can find some SAFe consultants that would tell you thats the case. The good ones will at least make sure you understand there are open questions and multiple options. The best ones would be able to share from their experience what worked where, the upsides and downsides, and be able to help you figure out what configuration to try as well as guide you in inspecting and adapting on your way to figuring out the SAFe configuration thats best for you.

Musings about Hard-coded Frameworks 5 Replies

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A recent discussion on the Scrum Alliance Linkedin group was around Mike Beedles claim that Hard-coded Frameworks are neither Agile or Frameworks which is clearly aimed primarily at SAFe.

I admit to thinking something similar before really getting to know SAFe in depth. Over time I realized SAFe isnt one size fits all. Far from it.

It has many configurations and options. Do we need the Value Stream level? a System Team? at which level? How many ARTs? Component teams or Feature teams? Which metrics? Which ART to start with? Even if you dont follow my Invitation-based SAFe implementation approach that is now a formal SAFe guidance article, you still have a lot of options at all levels and it is hardly a hard-coded methodology. Yes, not all practitioners understand this. But thats a familiar problem from the Scrum space isnt it. Though shall do tasks. Though shall estimate in story points using planning poker. Though shall stand up in the Daily Scrum.

Scrum was and is a powerful tool. SAFe, Enterprise Scrum, Nexus, LeSS, Kanban and others are powerful tools as well. A powerful tool is typically also dangerous at the wrong hands or the unexperienced hands without good guidance.

Besides it IS funny to hear about the danger of force-fitting a hard-coded framework from leaders in the scrum community that have been telling us about SHU and following practices and the danger of scrum-but all along. And rightly so! Sometimes you do need to insist on a practice/change even if it feels hard! Agile IS about challenging your comfort zone.

Can we all agree that the real art/expertise is to figure out the right set of practices that is the goldilock between too much force-fitting and too-easy common sense that is somehow too close to the status quo?

(Updated) Oh and also can we also agree theres a huge difference between force- fitting practices to challenge your comfort zone (which is healthy change management done right) and forcing people to do something vs inviting them to consider trying it?

Agile Marketing Validation Board Leave a reply

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes Validated Learning Over Opinions and Conventions

A couple of weeks ago I was helping kickoff a team of 8-10 Agile Marketing teams. The kickoff spanning a couple of days includes:

Agile Marketing trainingHigh level planning of their first quarterIteration planning for their first agile iteration

While doing this I saw some gaps between the training and the actual planning around the whole validation/experimentation/learning thing. In other words the difference between increments and iterations.

Its not iterating if youre not inspecting and possibly adapting along the way.

Taking a big campaign and breaking it into small tasks and planning two weeks at a time is one step towards Agile Marketing.

Running demos to show what youve accomplished and daily scrums to help manage the progress is a second step.

Thats just a glimpse of what Agile Marketing is really about.

This is why when we got to high level planning I felt something was missing from how the teams were planning. They were working on an MVP BOM A Minimally Viable Program Bill Of Materials describing the minimum aspects of the campaign/program they were focusing on.

It was a good start to focus on smaller more minimal programs/campaigns and working incrementally. But I felt the iterative/learning message was missing from the discussion once we moved from theory to practice.

Lets Use A Lean Startup Validation Board

At that point I recalled the Lean Startup Validation Board. I first learned about the Validation Board and practiced using it as a mentor in a Lean Startup Machine event back in Tel Aviv. It is a practical hands on planning tool that focuses you on what you dont know and need to learn.

In the classic Lean Startup context it should help you in your search for a Product Market Fit. You start by identifying your hypothesis around who are your potential customers, whats the problem you think they have, and what solution might fit their need. You then try to think what are your core assumptions that would need to be true in order for all your hypothesis to be true.

Its all about risks

You then look for the riskiest assumption the one you feel might be the first one to bring your house of cards down. Then you structure experiments/validated learning around that. If your experiment validates your assumption you move to the next assumption. If it invalidates it you need to pivot to another set of hypothesiss and start the core assumptions validation process again.

Is This Product Management Tool Good For Agile Marketing?

Mostly, yes! The minimum tweaking I would do is to change from Solution Hypothesis to Marketing Solution Hypothesis. When I say Marketing Solution I include things like channel or message.

An example of a channel hypothesis might be we think that Snapchat can be a useful marketing channel for us. A messaging hypothesis might be During a snow storm people would really connect to messages regarding vacations in warm places. 

After Finding Product Market Fit Search For A Streamlined Customers Journey

An Agile Marketing team is many times focused on scaling/growing revenue (After Product Market Fit was already found/established). So these teams are focused on finding new creative ways to reach more people in the identified market and optimizing their customers journey.

So if youre serious about Agile Marketing, dont just plan tasks. Plan experiments aimed at validating assumptions. Plan to learn. Plan to iterate.

Speaking at Lean/Agile US 2017 February 27-28th 1 Reply

Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute

Lean/Agile US 2017 is a new conference taking place in south Florida on February 27-28th. It is an interesting attempt trying to reboot some of the missing Lean-oriented agile community.

I was invited to speak about approaches to Scaling Lean/Agile from my perspective and experience as well as give a deeper half-day introduction to SAFe workshop.

The program looks very interesting with lots of long-time friends who happen to be thought-leaders in our small world of post-agile thinking.

If youre interested in going beyond the classic treatment of Agile/Scrum (And Im guessing you are if youre reading my blog) youll find the program and the discussions very refreshing Im sure.

So see you in Fort Lauderdale later in February?

LeanAgile US 2017

My recent posts on the AgileSparks BlogOrganizing around Outcomes with OKRs and ScrumHow Leaders can support and leverage the Scrum ArtifactsHow leaders can effectively support and leverage the Scrum EventsVideo Recording: Scaling Agile with Continuous LearningFixing OKR Theater using ScrumScrum Guide for Leaders – Supporting the Scrum accountabilities/rolesScrum Values – The Leader’s perspectiveThe Scrum Guide – A Leader’s PerspectiveImproving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR FlowHow Vendors Can Apply Customer Centricity When Organizing Around Value Recent Posts A Kanban for Marketing Board Example SAFe Configurations Musings about Hard-coded Frameworks Agile Marketing Validation Board Speaking at Lean/Agile US 2017 February 27-28th

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