How to balance predictability and value creation?

This is a challenge each project faces – bigger the project, bigger the challenge. This need for predictability is real because most of our world is not Agile but milestone and time driven. The enterprise customers need to know the date of a product release to plan for lab upgrade, the finance needs to know about lab upgrade so that they can allocate that money in a particular quarter and the CFO needs to know the quarterly spend to provide Wall Street guidance on the share price. On the other hand delivering value is a discovery process and value creation happens after multiple build-measure-learn iterations.

What & Why:

Core4 Team helps in having right governance for Agile teams. A concept of “Core 4” team is a way of improving predictability and managing dependencies and risks of critical programs. This typically evolves when the key stakeholders are working in tandem, building informal relations, trusting and backing each other. The reason of documenting this is to share how this model works so that teams/programs can evaluate if something like this can help their program become more predictable.

How:

Core4 embodies a team of a PO, an SM, a Dev Manager and an Architect. These 4 roles represent the different functions primarily involved in delivering a feature. If we have a group with representation from these functions that acts as a bridge between these functions – communications, decisions, risk mitigations can happen faster. There will be lesser conflicts and more empowered and engaged teams. The most important value that needs to be shared across the Core4 stakeholders is trust. Once trust is established this group can act as a dynamo to move the project ahead.

Story mapping is eliciting information about a solution and visually displaying a backlog in context. Story maps can help the team determine if the solution is a viable solution, decide on an MVP and identify dependencies, risks, assumptions, unknowns and blockers

This session would cover

• Output Versus Outcome
• Story Map: What is it and Why Use it
• Story Map Preparation
• Exercise
• 6 Parts to a Story Map Creation
• Summary and Example
• Now and Later