It doesn’t take a lot of money to quickly realize that diversification is the key to managing your risk. If you role the dice and invest all your money in one stock, you might hit it big. However, history shows that you will likely walk away very sad. One key to successful investment is diversification…
So what does diversification have to do with Agile? Well… in terms of release planning and vision at an enterprise scale, it’s everything! The standard approach the industry has traditionally used for software development is to define a vision and road map that in turn is used to accurately plan the development, testing, documentation, deployment, etc. of a new set of functional features.
This “rigid” plan is then locked and execution starts. Any shift in execution is viewed as a bad thing which in turn leads to the “next” plan being adjusted because the current plan obviously can’t change – it’s locked! In the agile world, you still have something similar – it’s just in the form of iterations and shorter duration releases. While you embrace change, you still want to define a solid plan that is just long enough to avoid constant shift distractions.
The power of diversification in agile comes from a thinking about planning a few different ways
- Minimize the duration of the release to the least time possible – this enables you to still lock the release in order to avoid distractions and constant shifts while still enabling time to market adjustments
- Define your road map in a manner that enables flexibility without giving up visibility. You don’t want to error on the side of not defining a road mapbecause you still need to be able to communicate commitments that extend beyond a single agile release to your sales force and clients. You can accomplish this by adjusting the number of external commitments (we call them MUST epics) based on the maturity or evolution of the plan of intent. The further out the POI, the less you commit to.
- Define your client commitments in terms of Epics. An epic is a larger grained story that is subsequently broken down into smaller grained stories. If you have capable product owners, you can communicate the spirit of the “epic” to your clients while still giving the team the autonomy to adjust via the proper definition of stories during the actual release execution
- Embrace change – let product managers shift the contents of a POI. The key guideline is that the closer the POI is to being converted to a true Plan of Record (POR) as part of the release planning process, the less it should change. This is a guideline that will improve your velocity and release planning efforts. It is not a hard rule.
So… why on earth would a product management group that is used to 1 to 2 year road maps ever agree to something like above? Well they won’t initially. However, if you involve them in the agile process and some of them actually dedicate a good portion of their time to successfully enabling the product owners of the iteration team, you will quickly see an almost reverse effect. Very quickly, they will recognize that the value of being able to adjust to the unknown is desirable and powerful. This combined with the ability to lock in a small subset of important features vs. the entire release is exactly what they needed. It’s just not a natural thing to do until you experience it first hand.
OK – diversification as a topic may have been a stretch. It’s just something I thought about as I was playing around with stocks and watching Jim Cramer’s Mad Money. Hopefully they can give you something to think about in the agile world!
