It is about Delivery, and Product Management, and Design and Engineering Software development, like many other fields, is continuously evolving with new roles emerging. We need to interweave these new roles into the existing organisational structures, potentially changing the organisational DNA. And this is proven to be difficult. We have…

Choose story count and save your energy to answer better questions. — Story points or story count? At the start of many projects, one question always emerges: “should we use story points or story count”? Teams always debate it. With passion. Why? Because they want to answer the following questions: At what pace do they deliver work (aka ‘throughput’ or ‘velocity’)? When will it be done, or…

Replace the impersonal RACIs with meaningful job responsibilities — because we are so much more than our job titles. — We love coming up with titles. Chief Product Owner (CPO). Chief Digital Officer (CDO). Engineering Lead (ED). We do it because we need an anchor to encapsulate what we do. But titles alone can be confusing. People can easily misunderstand their true meaning and role. Is my definition of a…

A heuristic-based approach to frictionless agile software development planning — Plans. Detailed. With all the activities and their durations and dependencies. Hard cast dates. Can we produce them, please? And if the estimated dates don’t fit the expected ones, let’s mark the plan red — we will crank up the project management activities to turn these dates into green ones…

Discovery, “the fact of discovering what was previously unknown”, is such a great word. Rich enough but not overly precise, lending itself to many uses. The concept of discovery is often used at the beginning of a software development project or product development as a phase concerned with discovering the…

Focus on the right things — I spent the last decade working on digital transformation projects and learned that we tend to focus and devote energy to the wrong aspects of transformation. Digital transformations often start with creating a benefits case — a way to justify such change. More often than not, though, these cases never…

Part 2. A self-reflection on remote working, one year on Forced by the pandemic, same as those people fortunate enough to be able to do it, I am working remotely for over a year. I am thankful and blessed, but I ask myself — am I genuinely working remotely? Or…

We create value in software development by building the right thing, building it well, at the right time. The “right thing” implies identifying the most valuable work items, “building it well” covers the quality of what we produce, and “the right time” means getting it in the hands of our…

Use of incremental design in improving ways of working — “We are unique. We are doing something special. In our case, all that Agile stuff is not applicable, and it goes out of the window.” And this is how it begins — an endless energy-sapping battle of whether Agile applies to us or not, to what is Agile. How can…