AGILE TRANSITION

We need the high beam.

An agile team focuses its work on the next sprint (2-3 weeks) and the next stage (3 months).

To get safely to its big goal, it needs the foresight and orientation that the PEP and a project plan provide beyond 3 months.

The PEP sets out key milestones, checklists and maturity levels for achieving gates.

There is a lot of company experience in there, and we want to continue to use it. However, please do not disenfranchise teams with over-detailed checklists.

Failure to meet a checklist item does not mean “automatically stopping”. Rather, we evaluate the risk of incurring “technical debt” for which we set a repayment plan in the backlog.

Dependencies are a reality.

Dependencies between goals enable the identification and tracking of the critical path in the project. Here, every day of delay means a day of project delay.

Knowing the critical path helps to make good and rule-based priority decisions. Don’t show hustle for things off the critical path – but put all energy on the critical path: fight for every day there. That goes to the top of the backlog.

The joint coffee fund.

We collect the buffers of the individual tasks on the critical path (implicit buffers) and condense them into a common buffer (explicit buffer) at the end of the critical path.

At the pace of the sprints, we check whether the buffer is being used up as planned, or whether something is getting out of hand and we have less progress than buffers are consuming.

The team, POT and departments look at buffer consumption and everyone contributes at their level and with their resources to keep the project on track.