Slides from Matt Alder's webinar on the increasing use of video interviewing technology in the recruitment process. Data and research is taken from Metashift's "Video Interviewing Guide" first published in 2013
www.bit.ly/metaguide
The first step for large enterprises transitioning toward a product-aligned operating model is to get shared agreement on this simple yet challenging question: "What is our product?"
This session will share techniques we have - and are - using to scale lean/agile product development in a large organization.
Detailed Description:
One of the biggest strengths—and concurrent challenges—for scaling product development with LeSS is defining what the “product” is. LeSS encourages product development teams to take as wide a view as possible and to use a customer-focused definition.
Great.
So, how do you define what your product is? And, how do you define your product in a manner that is collaborative, engaging, and sticky? Based on ongoing work inside a very large global technology infrastructure organization, we share techniques we have and are using to answer this essential question: “What is our Product?”
In this session, Andy and Ellen share techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using an “outside-in”, customer-focused perspective - and do so with a product management mindset. They also share “meta” learning points about using these techniques in facilitated sessions in ways that optimize mutual learning.
Presented at the LeSs Conference 2018 by Andy Repton and Ellen Gottesdiener, September 2018
Closing Keynote for IIBA D.C. BusinessAnalysis Development Day (DCBADD)
Agile product discovery is essential for continuous delivery of high-quality solutions. At the same time, discovery is also one of the most challenging aspects of any project. A wide range of stakeholders must collaboratively explore and agree on inventive and valuable product requirements. To do this, many agile teams rely on user stories, and perhaps a few other techniques, such as story maps and personas.
While these are a good start, they are not sufficient for the complex products most teams wrestle with today.
Ellen reaches beyond discovery-as-usual to highlight creative ways to enlighten and energize your agile product discovery.
One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of Agile product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver at the right time, for the right customer, and refining them for delivery. This session will share a commonsense, tested approach for defining and refining backlog items so they are “ready” to get to “done.” Explore how refinement is crucial to smooth Scrum flow, shared understanding, and healthy product development team.
(Ellen's slides presented at April 2018 Global Scrum Gathering).
Nonfunctional requirements-forgotten-negleted-misunderstood-agile devpractice...EBG Consulting, Inc.
Implementing nonfunctional requirements is essential to build the right product. Yet teams often struggle with when and how to discover, specify, and test these requirements. Many teams neglect nonfunctional requirements up front, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements; other teams specify them incompletely or with untestable and non-measurable attributes. EBG's Paul Reed introduces three types of nonfunctional requirements: interfaces; attributes including performance, usability, security, and robustness; and the environment for the product’s design and implementation. Paul helps you explore ways to visualize interfaces and value their options, examine techniques to specify quality attributes and their acceptance criteria, and consider environmental requirements. Leave with a better understanding of how these dimensions intertwine with functional requirements, and the challenges of incorporating nonfunctional requirements in your product backlog. Ellen shared a fast-paced survey of key practices and an exercise designed to help you discover and define holistic nonfunctional requirements for your agile project.
How Agile Reduces Requirements Risk Ebg Consulting Slide ShareEBG Consulting, Inc.
Learn how agile practices reduce the many risks associated with requirements in this presentation by EBG Consulting's Ellen Gottesdiener.
To read a companion article, go to:
http://ebgconsulting.com/Pubs/Articles/HowAgilePracticesReduceReqtsRisk_BetterSw_Gottesdiener_JuAu2009.pdf
That Settles It: Techniques for Transparent & Trusted Decision Making EBG Consulting, Inc.
Your team makes countless product and process decisions: vision, product value, requirements to deliver, acceptance criteria, validation tests, platforms and tools, requirements or backlog management, metrics, delivery cadence, risks to proactively mitigate, and more.
Ellen Gottesdiener explores how participatory decision making is essential for fostering collaboration. Learn practical techniques for deciding how to decide. Leave with a toolkit to align your choices with your team values.
Learn:
* How to identify types of product and process decisions made on projects, including their timing and stakeholders
* Recognize decision-making traps, risks, and blunders
* Discover a tried and true—and transparent—decision-making process you can use right away in your work
Agile product managers and product owners are challenged to engage with a wide range of stakeholders. They need a way to collaboratively and transparently discover the value your product can deliver. In this #DiscoveryDojo, you experience engaging stakeholders in Structured Conversations to explore product options using the 7 Product Dimensions to define valuable and actionable backlog items ready for delivery. You experience how these conversations are essential for ongoing backlog refinement. This interactive evening weaves lightning quick presentation moments with hands-on practice in coaching dojo circles.
Keynote by Mary Gorman at Agile Testing Days 2013.
If your agile team wants to deliver a high-quality product, testing is essential. But some teams see testing as a “dependent” activity—dependent on requirements and dependent on development. If this perspective implies putting groups’ needs before your own or being controlled or manipulated by others, it’s unhealthy.
In successful agile teams, the members are neither dependent nor independent. Instead they’re interdependent—mutually reliant on and responsible to each other. Healthy interdependence can take many forms. Do you know which one your team operates under? Mary Gorman explores how test activities can enable and strengthen interdependencies among people and practices, and within the product itself to enhance the quality of your products and process.
The first step for large enterprises transitioning toward a product-aligned operating model is to get shared agreement on this simple yet challenging question: "What is our product?"
This session will share techniques we have - and are - using to scale lean/agile product development in a large organization.
Detailed Description:
One of the biggest strengths—and concurrent challenges—for scaling product development with LeSS is defining what the “product” is. LeSS encourages product development teams to take as wide a view as possible and to use a customer-focused definition.
Great.
So, how do you define what your product is? And, how do you define your product in a manner that is collaborative, engaging, and sticky? Based on ongoing work inside a very large global technology infrastructure organization, we share techniques we have and are using to answer this essential question: “What is our Product?”
In this session, Andy and Ellen share techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using an “outside-in”, customer-focused perspective - and do so with a product management mindset. They also share “meta” learning points about using these techniques in facilitated sessions in ways that optimize mutual learning.
Presented at the LeSs Conference 2018 by Andy Repton and Ellen Gottesdiener, September 2018
Closing Keynote for IIBA D.C. BusinessAnalysis Development Day (DCBADD)
Agile product discovery is essential for continuous delivery of high-quality solutions. At the same time, discovery is also one of the most challenging aspects of any project. A wide range of stakeholders must collaboratively explore and agree on inventive and valuable product requirements. To do this, many agile teams rely on user stories, and perhaps a few other techniques, such as story maps and personas.
While these are a good start, they are not sufficient for the complex products most teams wrestle with today.
Ellen reaches beyond discovery-as-usual to highlight creative ways to enlighten and energize your agile product discovery.
One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of Agile product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver at the right time, for the right customer, and refining them for delivery. This session will share a commonsense, tested approach for defining and refining backlog items so they are “ready” to get to “done.” Explore how refinement is crucial to smooth Scrum flow, shared understanding, and healthy product development team.
(Ellen's slides presented at April 2018 Global Scrum Gathering).
Nonfunctional requirements-forgotten-negleted-misunderstood-agile devpractice...EBG Consulting, Inc.
Implementing nonfunctional requirements is essential to build the right product. Yet teams often struggle with when and how to discover, specify, and test these requirements. Many teams neglect nonfunctional requirements up front, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements; other teams specify them incompletely or with untestable and non-measurable attributes. EBG's Paul Reed introduces three types of nonfunctional requirements: interfaces; attributes including performance, usability, security, and robustness; and the environment for the product’s design and implementation. Paul helps you explore ways to visualize interfaces and value their options, examine techniques to specify quality attributes and their acceptance criteria, and consider environmental requirements. Leave with a better understanding of how these dimensions intertwine with functional requirements, and the challenges of incorporating nonfunctional requirements in your product backlog. Ellen shared a fast-paced survey of key practices and an exercise designed to help you discover and define holistic nonfunctional requirements for your agile project.
How Agile Reduces Requirements Risk Ebg Consulting Slide ShareEBG Consulting, Inc.
Learn how agile practices reduce the many risks associated with requirements in this presentation by EBG Consulting's Ellen Gottesdiener.
To read a companion article, go to:
http://ebgconsulting.com/Pubs/Articles/HowAgilePracticesReduceReqtsRisk_BetterSw_Gottesdiener_JuAu2009.pdf
That Settles It: Techniques for Transparent & Trusted Decision Making EBG Consulting, Inc.
Your team makes countless product and process decisions: vision, product value, requirements to deliver, acceptance criteria, validation tests, platforms and tools, requirements or backlog management, metrics, delivery cadence, risks to proactively mitigate, and more.
Ellen Gottesdiener explores how participatory decision making is essential for fostering collaboration. Learn practical techniques for deciding how to decide. Leave with a toolkit to align your choices with your team values.
Learn:
* How to identify types of product and process decisions made on projects, including their timing and stakeholders
* Recognize decision-making traps, risks, and blunders
* Discover a tried and true—and transparent—decision-making process you can use right away in your work
Agile product managers and product owners are challenged to engage with a wide range of stakeholders. They need a way to collaboratively and transparently discover the value your product can deliver. In this #DiscoveryDojo, you experience engaging stakeholders in Structured Conversations to explore product options using the 7 Product Dimensions to define valuable and actionable backlog items ready for delivery. You experience how these conversations are essential for ongoing backlog refinement. This interactive evening weaves lightning quick presentation moments with hands-on practice in coaching dojo circles.
Keynote by Mary Gorman at Agile Testing Days 2013.
If your agile team wants to deliver a high-quality product, testing is essential. But some teams see testing as a “dependent” activity—dependent on requirements and dependent on development. If this perspective implies putting groups’ needs before your own or being controlled or manipulated by others, it’s unhealthy.
In successful agile teams, the members are neither dependent nor independent. Instead they’re interdependent—mutually reliant on and responsible to each other. Healthy interdependence can take many forms. Do you know which one your team operates under? Mary Gorman explores how test activities can enable and strengthen interdependencies among people and practices, and within the product itself to enhance the quality of your products and process.
[Presented at Product Management Festival 2014 | 17 September 2014 | Zurich, Switzerland]
Problems that result from an unclear, ambiguous, or inaccurate understanding of product scope can permeate and threaten your entire product development effort. This is known as “scope creep”—the unrestrained expansion of requirements as the project proceeds. Scope creep is often cited as a cause of excess costs, late delivery, and dissatisfied customers. Yet discovering requirements is about gaining an ever-growing understanding of them. So isn’t scope creep to be expected? Can—and should—you identify and limit the scope of a product’s requirements?
Join Ellen Gottesdiener as she shares tools and techniques for efficiently and effectively identifying and managing product scope. Learn how you can provide real value to your projects by reducing the risks of scope creep while establishing clear project focus.
Power Up Your Agile Planning and Analysis: Deliver Value Via Structured Conve...EBG Consulting, Inc.
For continual value delivery, stakeholders must partner to develop a shared understanding of product needs. How does this partnership gain a focused yet holistic understanding of the highest‐value requirements? How do they effectively plan the project so that the delivery team builds the right product, at the right time? Learn how to go beyond user stories and engage in “structured conversations” to explore and evaluate product needs and clearly identify what to build and when. You’ll use these conversations to fuel your daily work, refine your product backlog, and efficiently plan, analyze, and allocate product needs to allocate them to delivery cycles.
Keynote by Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting
Agile Development Practices ~ 05 March 2013 ~ Potsdam, Germany
Learn to effectively and efficiently explore, evaluate, and confirm a shared understanding of refined backlog items using Structured conversations with the 7 Product Dimensions so they are ready for implementation.
(Presented at Agile Day New York City September 2018)
One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of Agile product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver, at the right time, for the right customer.
Many teams rely on user stories to discover and define Agile product requirements. But user stories often lead to confusion, bloated backlogs, ineffective or inconsistent planning, and erratic sprint flow. This thrashing is not how user stories are intended to work!
Join Ellen Gottesdiener in this fast-paced dive into a common-sense, tested approach to user stories. You’ll follow a story as it’s sliced across the seven product dimensions, based on value. You’ll learn how structured conversations enable you to quickly explore, evaluate, and confirm stories. See how making your user stories “ready” is key for incremental delivery of your “done” product.
In theory the introduction of agile can deliver a huge number of benefits. However it still poses a challenge in terms of adoption, especially when it comes to testing, and in practice assuming the right principles and approaches, enabling mind set changes of key stakeholders and planning out a successful agile journey is not an easy task. Sogeti UK's agile Subject Matter Expert, Daryl Searle, explores the benefits and pitfalls of agile and highlights how a selection of our clients have transitioned to agile methods including the outcomes they have seen.
Agile Product Management: Do the Right Things, Not EverythingEBG Consulting, Inc.
Learn to lighten the load of product management and ownership while strengthening your product ecosystem, making space for the right things amidst the clutter of everything.
Presented at Big Apple Scrum Day, May 2019
For more, read:
https://www.ebgconsulting.com/blog/product-manager-product-owner/
https://www.ebgconsulting.com/blog/product-manager-product-owner-part-2/
https://www.ebgconsulting.com/blog/right-things-not-everything-product-management-ownership/
Explore, Evaluate, Confirm Product Needs with Structured ConversationsEBG Consulting, Inc.
Collaborate to discover and deliver valued products using structured conversations:
Your agile team needs a holistic understanding of the most valuable product needs to deliver—just-in-time and just enough. Ellen shares how product partners—customers, business and technology stakeholders—engage in structured conversations to explore, evaluate and confirm product needs. Hear about essential practices you can use in your daily work that blend value‐based decision‐making, a testing mindset, and disciplined analysis. You will see how front‐loading verification and validation when discovering product needs fuels collaboration, saves development time and is instrumental to delivering a high quality product.
[Presented in NYC, 01-October-2012 at Skillsmatter's the Agile BDD Exchange in New York City]
My presentation at UniCom Agile methods conference in Amsterdam at 14 Novembe...Rik Marselis
The main goal of IT is to create an increase in your Business Success. In Agile development various activities take place, such as requirements elaboration, design, development, testing and acceptance. Testing is often a separate phase, even in agile projects. Many people involved in IT think of testing as “a fact of life”. They don’t challenge its existence but just want it to be as cheap and quick as possible.
When stakeholders complain to me that testing takes too long or is too expensive I often have to explain to them that it is not the testing that takes so long but the fixing of defects and the subsequent retests (in a recent project we had an average of 6 retests!!). So I tell them that in their future projects they should rename the testing phase to the “fixing phase”.
As soon as I suggest this they say “hey, but we don’t want a fixing phase”. And that of course is true!
How can we get rid if this “fixing phase”? By doing all lifecycle activities right the first time so no faults will go forward. We must prevent defects from the start, not fix them at the end. This will ask for special attention in the collaboration of all people and artifacts involved, not only in the Agile team but also in the entire organization. Also this requires a focus on quality and risk from the very moment an idea for an IT-change arises.
During this presentation Rik elaborates on the vision on how to increase the business success by properly applying Agile principles, for example from the Scrum method.
Product Camp Boston 2015 | 2 May 2015
-----
On the surface, user stories seem pretty straightforward: Just write “As a...I need to...So that...” on an index card.
But in reality user stories often lead to a confusing array of struggles and puzzles, such as losing precious engineering time during iterations with analysis; delivering the wrong product slice—or delivering it with errors; delivering late; and more. Surely this chaos is not how user stories are intended to work!
Ellen Gottesdiener shares practical ways for product managers and product owners to mitigate the troubles of user stories while amplifying their advantages. Learn the power of collaboratively uncovering user stories, when and how to engage with engineering and product stakeholders, and guidelines for effective user stories. Leave with a straightforward, holistic approach to stories that will smooth the way for a successful iterative delivery effort.
Intro to Agile Requirements: User Stories, Backlogs and BeyondEBG Consulting, Inc.
Ellen Gottesdiener's Agile 2015 session (invited session in the Agile Bootcamp track, August 2015).
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One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver at the right time—and for the right customer. User stories and product backlogs are useful tools, but they aren't the only elements you'll need.
In this fast-paced introductory session, Ellen shares a common-sense approach to agile requirements that will help you reduce risk and deliver value. She surveys powerful ways to have colorful and collaborative requirements conversations. Discover how acceptance tests, prototypes, and models articulate important details. Understand the characteristics of a healthy backlog and review the methods that agile teams use when mining the backlog for business value.
This session debunks commonly held agile requirements myths and misconceptions. These include: “user stories are requirements”; “agile teams don’t do planning”; “requirements documentation goes away in agile”; and “agile teams don’t do analysis”. Come and see how a holistic approach to agile requirements can take you beyond user stories to a place where stakeholders can converse, collaborate, and co-create a shared understanding of ever-evolving product needs.
Session learning objectives include:
* Understand how agile requirements can reduce risk and deliver value, faster
* Learn common myths and misconceptions of agile requirements
* Recognize the utility—and limitations of user stories
* Outline ways agile teams supplement user stories
* Understand characteristics of a healthy backlog
To be product-aligned and customer-focused, everyone in your product development ecosystem needs to agree on the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?” Many organizations don’t have clarity on what their product or products are. Ambiguity and disagreement on the answer contribute to slow response to changing customer and market needs and less than satisfying product outcomes. It thwarts your efforts to scale agile product development and causes a plethora of organizational and communication woes.
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) rightly states that this question—and the imperative to answer it—is one of your most important decisions for successful product development. A clear answer to “What is Your Product” powers all aspects of product development, including product management roles, team organization, and product activities. The implications are vast and deep, especially in large enterprises. Product definition is one of the paramount steps in LeSS adoption. Depending on how a product is defined (how widely) an organization may consider simple LeSS or LeSS Huge. Based on the ladder, team structure and alignment is defined, product owner team is created, etc. Product definition has a significant impact on organisational design.
Based on ongoing work with a variety of organizations, Ellen shares with the NYC Large Scale Scrum (Less) Meetup techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using a cohesive set of product definition principles. Ellen explains why this question is so vital to your product success and ways she’s helped organizations co-discover the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”
Whether your organization’s product or products are a primary source of revenue or are essential for your business operations, you will learn techniques that help instill product-thinking and shared understanding.
To be product-aligned and customer-focused, everyone in your product development ecosystem needs to agree on the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”
Many organizations don’t have clarity on what their product or products are. Ambiguity and disagreement on the answer contribute to slow response to changing customer and market needs and less than satisfying product outcomes. It thwarts your efforts to scale agile product development and causes a plethora of organizational and communication woes.
In this keynote, Ellen shares share why this question is so vital to your product success and ways she’s helped organizations co-discover the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”
Many teams struggle with getting user stories small enough and sufficiently understood for planning and delivery. Slicing user stories so they are valuable and actionable is collaborative work - involving the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the team. See how slicing user stories accelerates ongoing backlog refinement, helps sprint and release planning, and increases delivered value.
These are slides from the webinar presented by the co-creator of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, and the industry's leading expert on story-slicing, Ellen Gottesdiener, on February 24th 2016.
Contact ellen@ebgconsulting.com if you are interested listening to the recording.
What is Your Product? Making Large-Scale Product Development WorkEBG Consulting, Inc.
These are slides from the workshop presented by Ellen Gottesdiener and Andy Repton on August 8, 2019, at Agile Development 2019:
The first step for large enterprises transitioning toward a product-aligned and customer-focused operating model is to get shared agreement on this simple yet challenging question: "What is our product?"
Your answer is one of the most important ones you make. It powers all aspects of product development including product management roles, team organization, and product activities. The implications are vast and deep, especially in a large enterprise.
Based on ongoing work inside a large global technology infrastructure organization, Andy and Ellen provide techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using an “outside-in”, customer-focused perspective—and do so with a product management mindset.
You will find the techniques we share useful, even for products that are mid-size or even smaller, because they help instill product-thinking and shared understanding.
Learning Outcomes:
On completion of the workshop, the learner will be able to
• Describe key principles—and their rationale—for defining your product
• Identify practical techniques to use in a product definition facilitated workshop
• Explain the mindsets and points of view that thwart product thinking, and ways to overcome them.
• Implement a collaborative process for helping people reflect, repeal, and reveal what their product is
The Contracting Two-Step: Patterns & Actions for Successful CollaborationEBG Consulting, Inc.
~ Presented at Agile Games 2018, Boston, MA. ~
Do your agile team members optimize each other’s skills & capabilities? Share personal development needs? Trust each other? Experience the “contracting two-step”, a metaphor for ways to identify & monitor mutual working agreements. Learn 3 activities to build agreements that make people awesome.
Do your agile team members make optimum use of each other’s skills and capabilities? Do they share their personal development needs? Do they trust each other? If not, consider the “contracting two-step” - a metaphor for simple yet powerful ways to identify and monitor mutual working agreements. Like a dance, contracting partners take mutual responsibility to reach shared goals. While not legally binding, the contract represents public, explicit commitments essential for successful collaborations.
Learn 3 activities to implement the “Contracting Two Step” on your agile team. Leave with activities and worksheets you can use to make people awesome.
Note: you can upload the MatchUp Canvas here: https://www.ebgconsulting.com/MatchUpCanvas(EBG_Consulting)(Gottesdiener)(v1.1).pdf
On the surface, user stories seem pretty straightforward: Just write “As a...I need to...So that...” on an index card. But in reality, user stories often lead to a confusing array of struggles and puzzles, such as losing precious engineering time during iterations with analysis; delivering the wrong product slice—or delivering it with errors; delivering late; and more. Surely this chaos is not how user stories are intended to work!
In this AIPMM webinar, Ellen Gottesdiener shares practical ways for agile product managers and product owners to mitigate the troubles of user stories while amplifying their advantages.
Learn the power of collaboratively uncovering user stories, when and how to engage with engineering and product stakeholders, and guidelines for effective user stories. Leave with a straightforward, holistic approach to stories that will smooth the way for a successful iterative delivery effort.
The realities of working in an enterprise (distributed teams, multiple stakeholders, etc) present a series of challenges when trying to plan and scale agile development. Learn how Rosetta Stone knit together a dozen existing JIRA Agile boards into a coherent program-level view of their Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) release train using JIRA Portfolio – without sacrificing team autonomy.
Products Not Projects: Delivering Value with Product RoadmapsEBG Consulting, Inc.
Presentation for Boston SPIN, Nov 2013 by Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting.
If you're managing your portfolio using projects—and not products—you may be missing the point. After all, the product-to-be is the basis for the vision, goals, and expected outcome.
A product roadmap articulates how you will continually deliver a valued product over a long time horizon and provides a framework for decision-making, focusing all stakeholders on the strategic view, guiding changes in the near-term plans.
Ellen Gottesdiener explains how product roadmaps give you a framework for ongoing decision making. Find out how using collaborative processes to create and evolve your roadmap allows you to re-envision and adapt your product to maximize each release.
Adapted from a talk given to the 2012 PMI Global Congress EMEA, this presentation identifies the "fuzziness" of scope as a constraint and shows how it can be reduced by looking at scope in terms of multiple dimensions--including that of change within the project itself.
Many states and cities across the US are promoting or succumbing to additional customer-sited Distributed Energy Resources (“DER”) such as solar and storage. As the number of grid interconnections increase, the following challenges (and effects) are arising:
1. Managing the manual approval process – straining the utility’s ability to meet service levels
2. Lack of consolidated data from installed DER’s – limiting the utility’s ability to plan its system, respond to outages, or account for resources in planning, operations and system load forecasting
3. Limited collaboration and communication tools between cities and utilities as they inspect systems – resulting in inefficiencies and redundancies
4. Difficult to forecast distributed generation – impacting system load requirements
As a refresher, Connect-the-Grid™ provides utilities, municipalities, and cooperatives the ability to:
1. Ease the application submission process through use of electronic forms by customers and contractors
2. Leverage workflow management features to better allocate staff resources
3. Utilize the master data set for DER asset tracking and reporting/dashboards
4. Deliver automatic notifications to utility staff when applications approach approval time requirements
5. Perform real-time distributed generation forecasting and more!
Contractors and electricity customers also benefit from the use of Connect-the-Grid™ through an improved customer experience.
[Presented at Product Management Festival 2014 | 17 September 2014 | Zurich, Switzerland]
Problems that result from an unclear, ambiguous, or inaccurate understanding of product scope can permeate and threaten your entire product development effort. This is known as “scope creep”—the unrestrained expansion of requirements as the project proceeds. Scope creep is often cited as a cause of excess costs, late delivery, and dissatisfied customers. Yet discovering requirements is about gaining an ever-growing understanding of them. So isn’t scope creep to be expected? Can—and should—you identify and limit the scope of a product’s requirements?
Join Ellen Gottesdiener as she shares tools and techniques for efficiently and effectively identifying and managing product scope. Learn how you can provide real value to your projects by reducing the risks of scope creep while establishing clear project focus.
Power Up Your Agile Planning and Analysis: Deliver Value Via Structured Conve...EBG Consulting, Inc.
For continual value delivery, stakeholders must partner to develop a shared understanding of product needs. How does this partnership gain a focused yet holistic understanding of the highest‐value requirements? How do they effectively plan the project so that the delivery team builds the right product, at the right time? Learn how to go beyond user stories and engage in “structured conversations” to explore and evaluate product needs and clearly identify what to build and when. You’ll use these conversations to fuel your daily work, refine your product backlog, and efficiently plan, analyze, and allocate product needs to allocate them to delivery cycles.
Keynote by Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting
Agile Development Practices ~ 05 March 2013 ~ Potsdam, Germany
Learn to effectively and efficiently explore, evaluate, and confirm a shared understanding of refined backlog items using Structured conversations with the 7 Product Dimensions so they are ready for implementation.
(Presented at Agile Day New York City September 2018)
One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of Agile product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver, at the right time, for the right customer.
Many teams rely on user stories to discover and define Agile product requirements. But user stories often lead to confusion, bloated backlogs, ineffective or inconsistent planning, and erratic sprint flow. This thrashing is not how user stories are intended to work!
Join Ellen Gottesdiener in this fast-paced dive into a common-sense, tested approach to user stories. You’ll follow a story as it’s sliced across the seven product dimensions, based on value. You’ll learn how structured conversations enable you to quickly explore, evaluate, and confirm stories. See how making your user stories “ready” is key for incremental delivery of your “done” product.
In theory the introduction of agile can deliver a huge number of benefits. However it still poses a challenge in terms of adoption, especially when it comes to testing, and in practice assuming the right principles and approaches, enabling mind set changes of key stakeholders and planning out a successful agile journey is not an easy task. Sogeti UK's agile Subject Matter Expert, Daryl Searle, explores the benefits and pitfalls of agile and highlights how a selection of our clients have transitioned to agile methods including the outcomes they have seen.
Agile Product Management: Do the Right Things, Not EverythingEBG Consulting, Inc.
Learn to lighten the load of product management and ownership while strengthening your product ecosystem, making space for the right things amidst the clutter of everything.
Presented at Big Apple Scrum Day, May 2019
For more, read:
https://www.ebgconsulting.com/blog/product-manager-product-owner/
https://www.ebgconsulting.com/blog/product-manager-product-owner-part-2/
https://www.ebgconsulting.com/blog/right-things-not-everything-product-management-ownership/
Explore, Evaluate, Confirm Product Needs with Structured ConversationsEBG Consulting, Inc.
Collaborate to discover and deliver valued products using structured conversations:
Your agile team needs a holistic understanding of the most valuable product needs to deliver—just-in-time and just enough. Ellen shares how product partners—customers, business and technology stakeholders—engage in structured conversations to explore, evaluate and confirm product needs. Hear about essential practices you can use in your daily work that blend value‐based decision‐making, a testing mindset, and disciplined analysis. You will see how front‐loading verification and validation when discovering product needs fuels collaboration, saves development time and is instrumental to delivering a high quality product.
[Presented in NYC, 01-October-2012 at Skillsmatter's the Agile BDD Exchange in New York City]
My presentation at UniCom Agile methods conference in Amsterdam at 14 Novembe...Rik Marselis
The main goal of IT is to create an increase in your Business Success. In Agile development various activities take place, such as requirements elaboration, design, development, testing and acceptance. Testing is often a separate phase, even in agile projects. Many people involved in IT think of testing as “a fact of life”. They don’t challenge its existence but just want it to be as cheap and quick as possible.
When stakeholders complain to me that testing takes too long or is too expensive I often have to explain to them that it is not the testing that takes so long but the fixing of defects and the subsequent retests (in a recent project we had an average of 6 retests!!). So I tell them that in their future projects they should rename the testing phase to the “fixing phase”.
As soon as I suggest this they say “hey, but we don’t want a fixing phase”. And that of course is true!
How can we get rid if this “fixing phase”? By doing all lifecycle activities right the first time so no faults will go forward. We must prevent defects from the start, not fix them at the end. This will ask for special attention in the collaboration of all people and artifacts involved, not only in the Agile team but also in the entire organization. Also this requires a focus on quality and risk from the very moment an idea for an IT-change arises.
During this presentation Rik elaborates on the vision on how to increase the business success by properly applying Agile principles, for example from the Scrum method.
Product Camp Boston 2015 | 2 May 2015
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On the surface, user stories seem pretty straightforward: Just write “As a...I need to...So that...” on an index card.
But in reality user stories often lead to a confusing array of struggles and puzzles, such as losing precious engineering time during iterations with analysis; delivering the wrong product slice—or delivering it with errors; delivering late; and more. Surely this chaos is not how user stories are intended to work!
Ellen Gottesdiener shares practical ways for product managers and product owners to mitigate the troubles of user stories while amplifying their advantages. Learn the power of collaboratively uncovering user stories, when and how to engage with engineering and product stakeholders, and guidelines for effective user stories. Leave with a straightforward, holistic approach to stories that will smooth the way for a successful iterative delivery effort.
Intro to Agile Requirements: User Stories, Backlogs and BeyondEBG Consulting, Inc.
Ellen Gottesdiener's Agile 2015 session (invited session in the Agile Bootcamp track, August 2015).
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One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver at the right time—and for the right customer. User stories and product backlogs are useful tools, but they aren't the only elements you'll need.
In this fast-paced introductory session, Ellen shares a common-sense approach to agile requirements that will help you reduce risk and deliver value. She surveys powerful ways to have colorful and collaborative requirements conversations. Discover how acceptance tests, prototypes, and models articulate important details. Understand the characteristics of a healthy backlog and review the methods that agile teams use when mining the backlog for business value.
This session debunks commonly held agile requirements myths and misconceptions. These include: “user stories are requirements”; “agile teams don’t do planning”; “requirements documentation goes away in agile”; and “agile teams don’t do analysis”. Come and see how a holistic approach to agile requirements can take you beyond user stories to a place where stakeholders can converse, collaborate, and co-create a shared understanding of ever-evolving product needs.
Session learning objectives include:
* Understand how agile requirements can reduce risk and deliver value, faster
* Learn common myths and misconceptions of agile requirements
* Recognize the utility—and limitations of user stories
* Outline ways agile teams supplement user stories
* Understand characteristics of a healthy backlog
To be product-aligned and customer-focused, everyone in your product development ecosystem needs to agree on the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?” Many organizations don’t have clarity on what their product or products are. Ambiguity and disagreement on the answer contribute to slow response to changing customer and market needs and less than satisfying product outcomes. It thwarts your efforts to scale agile product development and causes a plethora of organizational and communication woes.
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) rightly states that this question—and the imperative to answer it—is one of your most important decisions for successful product development. A clear answer to “What is Your Product” powers all aspects of product development, including product management roles, team organization, and product activities. The implications are vast and deep, especially in large enterprises. Product definition is one of the paramount steps in LeSS adoption. Depending on how a product is defined (how widely) an organization may consider simple LeSS or LeSS Huge. Based on the ladder, team structure and alignment is defined, product owner team is created, etc. Product definition has a significant impact on organisational design.
Based on ongoing work with a variety of organizations, Ellen shares with the NYC Large Scale Scrum (Less) Meetup techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using a cohesive set of product definition principles. Ellen explains why this question is so vital to your product success and ways she’s helped organizations co-discover the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”
Whether your organization’s product or products are a primary source of revenue or are essential for your business operations, you will learn techniques that help instill product-thinking and shared understanding.
To be product-aligned and customer-focused, everyone in your product development ecosystem needs to agree on the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”
Many organizations don’t have clarity on what their product or products are. Ambiguity and disagreement on the answer contribute to slow response to changing customer and market needs and less than satisfying product outcomes. It thwarts your efforts to scale agile product development and causes a plethora of organizational and communication woes.
In this keynote, Ellen shares share why this question is so vital to your product success and ways she’s helped organizations co-discover the answer to the question, “What is Your Product?”
Many teams struggle with getting user stories small enough and sufficiently understood for planning and delivery. Slicing user stories so they are valuable and actionable is collaborative work - involving the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the team. See how slicing user stories accelerates ongoing backlog refinement, helps sprint and release planning, and increases delivered value.
These are slides from the webinar presented by the co-creator of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland, and the industry's leading expert on story-slicing, Ellen Gottesdiener, on February 24th 2016.
Contact ellen@ebgconsulting.com if you are interested listening to the recording.
What is Your Product? Making Large-Scale Product Development WorkEBG Consulting, Inc.
These are slides from the workshop presented by Ellen Gottesdiener and Andy Repton on August 8, 2019, at Agile Development 2019:
The first step for large enterprises transitioning toward a product-aligned and customer-focused operating model is to get shared agreement on this simple yet challenging question: "What is our product?"
Your answer is one of the most important ones you make. It powers all aspects of product development including product management roles, team organization, and product activities. The implications are vast and deep, especially in a large enterprise.
Based on ongoing work inside a large global technology infrastructure organization, Andy and Ellen provide techniques for enabling product development leaders and communities to define their product using an “outside-in”, customer-focused perspective—and do so with a product management mindset.
You will find the techniques we share useful, even for products that are mid-size or even smaller, because they help instill product-thinking and shared understanding.
Learning Outcomes:
On completion of the workshop, the learner will be able to
• Describe key principles—and their rationale—for defining your product
• Identify practical techniques to use in a product definition facilitated workshop
• Explain the mindsets and points of view that thwart product thinking, and ways to overcome them.
• Implement a collaborative process for helping people reflect, repeal, and reveal what their product is
The Contracting Two-Step: Patterns & Actions for Successful CollaborationEBG Consulting, Inc.
~ Presented at Agile Games 2018, Boston, MA. ~
Do your agile team members optimize each other’s skills & capabilities? Share personal development needs? Trust each other? Experience the “contracting two-step”, a metaphor for ways to identify & monitor mutual working agreements. Learn 3 activities to build agreements that make people awesome.
Do your agile team members make optimum use of each other’s skills and capabilities? Do they share their personal development needs? Do they trust each other? If not, consider the “contracting two-step” - a metaphor for simple yet powerful ways to identify and monitor mutual working agreements. Like a dance, contracting partners take mutual responsibility to reach shared goals. While not legally binding, the contract represents public, explicit commitments essential for successful collaborations.
Learn 3 activities to implement the “Contracting Two Step” on your agile team. Leave with activities and worksheets you can use to make people awesome.
Note: you can upload the MatchUp Canvas here: https://www.ebgconsulting.com/MatchUpCanvas(EBG_Consulting)(Gottesdiener)(v1.1).pdf
On the surface, user stories seem pretty straightforward: Just write “As a...I need to...So that...” on an index card. But in reality, user stories often lead to a confusing array of struggles and puzzles, such as losing precious engineering time during iterations with analysis; delivering the wrong product slice—or delivering it with errors; delivering late; and more. Surely this chaos is not how user stories are intended to work!
In this AIPMM webinar, Ellen Gottesdiener shares practical ways for agile product managers and product owners to mitigate the troubles of user stories while amplifying their advantages.
Learn the power of collaboratively uncovering user stories, when and how to engage with engineering and product stakeholders, and guidelines for effective user stories. Leave with a straightforward, holistic approach to stories that will smooth the way for a successful iterative delivery effort.
The realities of working in an enterprise (distributed teams, multiple stakeholders, etc) present a series of challenges when trying to plan and scale agile development. Learn how Rosetta Stone knit together a dozen existing JIRA Agile boards into a coherent program-level view of their Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) release train using JIRA Portfolio – without sacrificing team autonomy.
Products Not Projects: Delivering Value with Product RoadmapsEBG Consulting, Inc.
Presentation for Boston SPIN, Nov 2013 by Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting.
If you're managing your portfolio using projects—and not products—you may be missing the point. After all, the product-to-be is the basis for the vision, goals, and expected outcome.
A product roadmap articulates how you will continually deliver a valued product over a long time horizon and provides a framework for decision-making, focusing all stakeholders on the strategic view, guiding changes in the near-term plans.
Ellen Gottesdiener explains how product roadmaps give you a framework for ongoing decision making. Find out how using collaborative processes to create and evolve your roadmap allows you to re-envision and adapt your product to maximize each release.
Adapted from a talk given to the 2012 PMI Global Congress EMEA, this presentation identifies the "fuzziness" of scope as a constraint and shows how it can be reduced by looking at scope in terms of multiple dimensions--including that of change within the project itself.
Many states and cities across the US are promoting or succumbing to additional customer-sited Distributed Energy Resources (“DER”) such as solar and storage. As the number of grid interconnections increase, the following challenges (and effects) are arising:
1. Managing the manual approval process – straining the utility’s ability to meet service levels
2. Lack of consolidated data from installed DER’s – limiting the utility’s ability to plan its system, respond to outages, or account for resources in planning, operations and system load forecasting
3. Limited collaboration and communication tools between cities and utilities as they inspect systems – resulting in inefficiencies and redundancies
4. Difficult to forecast distributed generation – impacting system load requirements
As a refresher, Connect-the-Grid™ provides utilities, municipalities, and cooperatives the ability to:
1. Ease the application submission process through use of electronic forms by customers and contractors
2. Leverage workflow management features to better allocate staff resources
3. Utilize the master data set for DER asset tracking and reporting/dashboards
4. Deliver automatic notifications to utility staff when applications approach approval time requirements
5. Perform real-time distributed generation forecasting and more!
Contractors and electricity customers also benefit from the use of Connect-the-Grid™ through an improved customer experience.
From Frustrated Foes to Staunch AdvocatesCynthia Clay
This one-hour webinar introduced customer service strategies to build customer loyalty at the moment of need: when they are in your face complaining about your service.
Describes the factors affecting individual competence and motivation and a process to manage organizational change. Presented at 2010 PMI Global Congress - North America in Washington DC.
eFolder Partner Chat Webinar — Designing Your First Managed Services ContracteFolder
Whether you're a seasoned MSP or are new to the game, designing your managed service agreements strategically is key to building lasting trust with your clients. Hear one partner share his secrets to success.
In this webinar, join Mike Neyman, Vice President of Strategic Planning at Guidant Partners, and Neeraj Periwal, Marketing Coordinator at eFolder, as they share how to design managed service contracts to meet your clients' needs and build a long-term partner-client relationship.
From Frustrated Foes to Staunch Advocates: How to Make Your Customers Love YouCynthia Clay
This one-hour webinar explores the powerful impact of customers and the positive impact of delighted customers, introducing five strategies to build customer loyalty.
PMI Global Congress North America 2015 - Change the system, not the people.Michal Raczka
Change the system, not the people. We as project leaders are responsible for the system of work. We should focus on this in order to create a healthy organization ready for successful projects. By attending this session you will be able to get 10 actionable “Lessons Learned and To Dos” based on observations and experience in a few organisations.
the PointZERO vision introduction (includes Quality Supervision overview)Rik Marselis
PointZERO is a vision aimed at increasing business success by parallel and step-by-step improvement across the application lifecycle, to shorten time to market, avoid and reduce cost, eliminate risk, and reach fit for purpose quality.
This vision was created by a team of Sogeti and Capgemini people and is still evolving. The books were published in 2012.
After reading these slides, you will be able to:
- Understand the problem with requirements
- Identify the difference between requirements, examples, and models
- Write better requirements!
There are a lot of different definitions of what a requirements is. In this presentation Cole not only helps answer that question, he will help you do it with style!
Cracking the Workplace Discipline Code Main.pptxWorkforce Group
Cultivating and maintaining discipline within teams is a critical differentiator for successful organisations.
Forward-thinking leaders and business managers understand the impact that discipline has on organisational success. A disciplined workforce operates with clarity, focus, and a shared understanding of expectations, ultimately driving better results, optimising productivity, and facilitating seamless collaboration.
Although discipline is not a one-size-fits-all approach, it can help create a work environment that encourages personal growth and accountability rather than solely relying on punitive measures.
In this deck, you will learn the significance of workplace discipline for organisational success. You’ll also learn
• Four (4) workplace discipline methods you should consider
• The best and most practical approach to implementing workplace discipline.
• Three (3) key tips to maintain a disciplined workplace.
B2B payments are rapidly changing. Find out the 5 key questions you need to be asking yourself to be sure you are mastering B2B payments today. Learn more at www.BlueSnap.com.
Business Valuation Principles for EntrepreneursBen Wann
This insightful presentation is designed to equip entrepreneurs with the essential knowledge and tools needed to accurately value their businesses. Understanding business valuation is crucial for making informed decisions, whether you're seeking investment, planning to sell, or simply want to gauge your company's worth.
Putting the SPARK into Virtual Training.pptxCynthia Clay
This 60-minute webinar, sponsored by Adobe, was delivered for the Training Mag Network. It explored the five elements of SPARK: Storytelling, Purpose, Action, Relationships, and Kudos. Knowing how to tell a well-structured story is key to building long-term memory. Stating a clear purpose that doesn't take away from the discovery learning process is critical. Ensuring that people move from theory to practical application is imperative. Creating strong social learning is the key to commitment and engagement. Validating and affirming participants' comments is the way to create a positive learning environment.
Falcon stands out as a top-tier P2P Invoice Discounting platform in India, bridging esteemed blue-chip companies and eager investors. Our goal is to transform the investment landscape in India by establishing a comprehensive destination for borrowers and investors with diverse profiles and needs, all while minimizing risk. What sets Falcon apart is the elimination of intermediaries such as commercial banks and depository institutions, allowing investors to enjoy higher yields.
Discover the innovative and creative projects that highlight my journey throu...dylandmeas
Discover the innovative and creative projects that highlight my journey through Full Sail University. Below, you’ll find a collection of my work showcasing my skills and expertise in digital marketing, event planning, and media production.
3.0 Project 2_ Developing My Brand Identity Kit.pptxtanyjahb
A personal brand exploration presentation summarizes an individual's unique qualities and goals, covering strengths, values, passions, and target audience. It helps individuals understand what makes them stand out, their desired image, and how they aim to achieve it.
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Enterprise Excellence is Inclusive Excellence.pdfKaiNexus
Enterprise excellence and inclusive excellence are closely linked, and real-world challenges have shown that both are essential to the success of any organization. To achieve enterprise excellence, organizations must focus on improving their operations and processes while creating an inclusive environment that engages everyone. In this interactive session, the facilitator will highlight commonly established business practices and how they limit our ability to engage everyone every day. More importantly, though, participants will likely gain increased awareness of what we can do differently to maximize enterprise excellence through deliberate inclusion.
What is Enterprise Excellence?
Enterprise Excellence is a holistic approach that's aimed at achieving world-class performance across all aspects of the organization.
What might I learn?
A way to engage all in creating Inclusive Excellence. Lessons from the US military and their parallels to the story of Harry Potter. How belt systems and CI teams can destroy inclusive practices. How leadership language invites people to the party. There are three things leaders can do to engage everyone every day: maximizing psychological safety to create environments where folks learn, contribute, and challenge the status quo.
Who might benefit? Anyone and everyone leading folks from the shop floor to top floor.
Dr. William Harvey is a seasoned Operations Leader with extensive experience in chemical processing, manufacturing, and operations management. At Michelman, he currently oversees multiple sites, leading teams in strategic planning and coaching/practicing continuous improvement. William is set to start his eighth year of teaching at the University of Cincinnati where he teaches marketing, finance, and management. William holds various certifications in change management, quality, leadership, operational excellence, team building, and DiSC, among others.
Affordable Stationery Printing Services in Jaipur | Navpack n PrintNavpack & Print
Looking for professional printing services in Jaipur? Navpack n Print offers high-quality and affordable stationery printing for all your business needs. Stand out with custom stationery designs and fast turnaround times. Contact us today for a quote!
The world of search engine optimization (SEO) is buzzing with discussions after Google confirmed that around 2,500 leaked internal documents related to its Search feature are indeed authentic. The revelation has sparked significant concerns within the SEO community. The leaked documents were initially reported by SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King, igniting widespread analysis and discourse. For More Info:- https://news.arihantwebtech.com/search-disrupted-googles-leaked-documents-rock-the-seo-world/
Company Valuation webinar series - Tuesday, 4 June 2024FelixPerez547899
This session provided an update as to the latest valuation data in the UK and then delved into a discussion on the upcoming election and the impacts on valuation. We finished, as always with a Q&A