program selection system

Salesforce.com took a big bang approach to implement a SCRUM method, with huge success. This meant big changes to how Product Managers work, how we interact with the team, and manages dependencies between teams.

No more 200 page functional specs, no more waiting 12-18 months before features got into customers hands. No more changes to the release dates – how do we survive?

Congratulations! You’ve just been granted initial funding for your Agile project! As the product manager you understand the market opportunity for your new Beer Miles rewards loyalty program, but how do you go from the business case to a product backlog? Your accountant says return on investment is key, the Marketing Director says user experience and community are key, while the IT says scalability and fault tolerance are high priorities. You have limited time and budget, and the pressure is on to make the product a success.

Being a product owner is a difficult job. BT has been using product owner teams to manage the details of “what should be built”. These teams own the content and the breakdown of user story epics into user stories for delivery teams and act as proxy customers to those delivery teams. This experience report examines a project, implementing an up to 24Mbps service over the 21CN network, which was successful in applying the approach and concludes with some advice on how best to apply Product Owner Teams.

SCRUM poses key challenges for usability. First, product goals are set without an adequate study of the user’s needs and context. The user stories selected may not be good enough from the usability perspective. Second, user stories of usability import may not be prioritized high enough. Third, given the fact that a product owner thinks in terms of the minimal marketable set of features in a just-in-time process, it is difficult for the development team to get a holistic view of the desired product or features.

This session is designed for agile practioners who are seeking to improve practices in large agile programs. It is targeted for experienced and inexperienced sponsors, product owners, scrum masters, project managers and people involved in business development and contract negociation.

Agile Development teams can utilize a number of techniques to visualize and track the items they work on. There is also various models to manage your personal life, Getting Things Done and the Mark Forster models.
For Product Owners and analysts there is a lack of similar tools and techniques. This demonstration will show how a Kanban board (task board with “states”) can be combined with a “round robin” scheme to keep analysist and Product Owners working on multiple tasks of high priority, but with potentially long lead times and fuzzy done criteria.

How do you quickly and effectively develop a healthy product backlog which you can use as a basis for iteration and release planning?

One of the central tenants of Agile practices is the emphasis on customer value. That’s great, but if you’re a product company then focusing on business value alone isn’t enough. You need to convert business value into actual money flowing into your company.

The biggest risk to most projects is building the wrong product. Regardless of how fast your agile team becomes, how brilliant your technical solutions are, or how many automated tests run continuously, nothing matters if you’re building the wrong product.

In this tutorial we’ll look at non-financial ways of both prioritizing product backlog items and choosing among competing project ideas. Included are relative weighting, theme screening, theme scoring, and Kano analysis.

This workshop is aimed at exploring and understanding the customer role on Agile projects. It will answer several common questions about this role, like: What’s an agile customer? What’s the role of the agile customer? Why is this role so important? Is the agile customer one person or a team? What traits should a agile customer have? Why does the role break down? There will be a highly interactive breakout session that will bring different perspectives on the topic from the participants experience and tries to deepen the understanding of this important issue.