Building Solutions With Agile Product Delivery Flashcards
Business owners
Business Owners are a small group of stakeholders who have the primary business and technical responsibility for governance, compliance, and return on investment (ROI) for a Solution developed by an Agile Release Train (ART). They are key stakeholders on the ART who must evaluate fitness for use and actively participate in certain ART events. Business Owners can be identified by asking the following questions: Who is ultimately responsible for business outcomes? Who can steer this ART to develop the right solution? Who can speak to the technical competence of the solution now and into the near future? Who should participate in planning, help eliminate impediments, and speak on behalf of development, the business, and the customer? Who can approve and defend a set of Program Increment (PI) plans, knowing full well that they will never satisfy everyone? Who can help coordinate the efforts with other departments and organizations within the Enterprise? The answers to these questions will identify the Business Owners, who will play a key role in helping the ART deliver value. Among other duties, they have specific responsibilities during PI Planning, where they participate in mission setting, planning, draft plan reviews, conducting management reviews, and problem-solving. They also assign business value to Team PI Objectives and approve the PI plan. But they don’t just disappear after planning. Active and continuous involvement throughout each PI by Business Owners is a determining factor in the success of each train.
Customer centricity
Customer-centric businesses generate greater profits, increased employee engagement, and more satisfied customers. Customer-centric governments and nonprofits create the resiliency, sustainability, and alignment needed to fulfill their mission. All customer-centric enterprises deliver whole-product solutions that are designed with a deep understanding of customer needs. Note: This article focuses on the mindset and impact of customer centricity. It should be read with the Design Thinking article, which focuses on the tools and practices of implementing design thinking in support of customer centricity. Details Customer centricity is a mindset: Whenever a customer-centric enterprise makes a decision, it deeply considers the effect it will have on its end users. This motivates us to: Focus on the customer – Customer-centric enterprises use segmentation to align and focus the enterprise on specific, targeted user segments Understand the customer’s needs – Customer-centric enterprises move beyond merely listening to customers who ask for features. Instead, they invest the time to identify underlying and ongoing customer needs Think and feel like the customer – Customer-centric enterprises try to see the world from their customer’s point of view Build whole product solutions – Customer-centric enterprises design a complete solution for the user’s needs, ensuring that the initial and long-term experience of the customer is always ideal and evolving as needed Know customer lifetime value – Customer-centric enterprises move beyond a transactional mentality and instead focus on creating longer term relationships based on a clear and accurate understanding of how the customer derives value from the solution
Design thinking
v5.scaledagileframework.com/design-thinking/
Design Thinking is a customer-centric development process that creates desirable products that are profitable and sustainable over their lifecycle.
Design thinking also inspires new ways to measure the success of our efforts: Desirable – Do customers and users want the solution? Feasible – Can we deliver the right solution through a combination of build, buy, partner, or acquire endeavors/activities? Viable – Is the way we build and offer the solution creating more value than cost? For example, in a for-profit enterprise, are we profitable? Sustainable – Are we proactively managing our solution to account for its expected product-market lifecycle?
Continuous integration
Continuous Integration (CI) is the process of taking features from the Program Backlog and developing, testing, integrating, and validating them in a staging environment where they are ready for deployment and release. CI is the second aspect in the four-part Continuous Delivery Pipeline of Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, and Release on Demand (Figure 1).
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/continuous-integration/
DevOps
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/DevOps/
DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices. It provides communication, integration, automation, and close cooperation among all the people needed to plan, develop, test, deploy, release, and maintain a Solution.
Solution demo
The Solution Demo is where the results of development efforts from the Solution Train are integrated, evaluated, and made visible to Customers and other stakeholders.
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/solution-demo/
Portfolio safe
Portfolio SAFe aligns strategy with execution and organizes solution development around the flow of value through one or more value streams. The portfolio configuration, which includes Essential SAFe, is the smallest configuration that can be used to achieve Business Agility and consists of the following (Figure 1): Three additional core competencies: The Lean Portfolio Management competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance The Continuous Learning Culture competency describes a set of values and practices that encourage individuals—and the enterprise as a whole—to continually increase knowledge, competence, performance, and innovation The Organizational Agility competency describes how Lean-thinking people and Agile teams optimize their business processes, evolve strategy with clear and decisive new commitments, and quickly adapt the organization as needed to capitalize on new opportunities The portfolio level roles, events, and artifacts The full spanning palette
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/Portfolio-SAFe/
value streams
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/value-streams/
strategic themes
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/strategic-themes/
Strategic Themes are differentiating business objectives that connect a portfolio to the strategy of the Enterprise. They influence portfolio strategy and provide business context for portfolio decision-making.
GUARDRAILS
https://www.scaledagileframework.com/GUARDRAILS/
Lean Budget Guardrails describe the policies and practices for budgeting, spending, and governance for a specific portfolio. SAFe provides strategies for Lean budgeting that eliminates the overhead of traditional project-based funding and cost accounting. In this model, LPM maintains appropriate levels of oversight through the allocation of value stream budgets and by applying Lean budget guardrails. This way, enterprises can have the best of both worlds: a development process that is far more responsive to market needs, along with professional and accountable management of spending.
- guiding investment by horizon
- applpy capacity allocation
- approving significant initiatives
- continuous business owner engagement
guiding investment by horizon
As described in Lean Budgets, portfolio investments are organized in accordance with investment horizons that reflect four time horizons. The amount of budget that a given value stream allocates to solutions in these horizons determines the near- and long-term health of both the value streams and portfolio.
Apply capacity alllocation
(% to features, enablers, and tech debt)
One solution to this challenge is that value streams (and ARTs) apply capacity allocation as a quantitative guardrail to determine how much of the total effort can be allocated for each type of activity for an upcoming Program Increment (PI), as shown in Figure 4. Each value stream should adapt the capacity allocation categories or add new ones as needed.
approving significant initiatives
Below threshold: If the epic estimate is below the portfolio epic threshold, approval is managed through the Program or Solution Kanban systems. Above threshold: If the epic estimate exceeds the portfolio epic threshold, it requires review and approval through the Portfolio Kanban system, regardless of which level the initiative originates. The Portfolio Epic threshold is defined by LPM to determine which Epics are a portfolio concern. Example thresholds include: Forecasted epic cost, forecasted number of PIs to implement an epic, strategic importance of the epic or a combination of these factors.
continuous business owner engagement
the minimum activities that Business Owners should actively participate in before, during and after PI execution. They are briefly described next and covered in more detail in the Business Owners article. Preparing for the upcoming PI – Business Owners ensure that ARTs and Solution Trains are allocating sufficient capacity for features, enablers and technical debt and maintenance, as well as providing input on prioritization of Features and Capabilities using Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF). Business Owners also collaborate with Product and Solution Management to assure that the work planned for the PI contains the right mix of investments that address near-term opportunities (horizon 1), long-term strategy (horizon 2 and 3) and that sufficient capacity is allocated for decommissioning solutions (horizon 0). PI Planning – During PI planning Business Owners actively participate in key activities, including the presentation of the vision, draft plan review, assigning business value to team PI objectives, and approving final plans. Inspect & Adapt (I&A) Workshop – During the I&A workshop, Business Owners provide feedback on the solution’s ‘fitness for purpose’ during the System Demo (or Solution Demo). The Business Owner’s feedback is critical, as only they can give the guidance the train needs to stay on course or take corrective action. Additionally, they help assess actual value achieved versus plan, and they participate in the problem-solving workshop that follows.
