Delivery Management focuses on the mechanics of project delivery as well as applying agile management principles beyond projects to programs, portfolios, and broader organizational contexts. It covers core agile concepts such as servant leadership, adaptive planning, frequent feedback for learning, and a focus on value-driven versus plan-driven delivery. Here you will compare and contrast agile management with traditional management approaches, and learn how to apply these concepts in your teams and organizations.
Target Audience
Primary audience: Existing and new Delivery Managers; traditional Project Managers making the transition to agile environments; senior managers new to agile and adaptive management styles; agile team members interested in taking on servant leadership roles; mid-level managers in agile organizations ready to apply their agile management skills to broader contexts; those managing agile delivery at scale across programs and portfolios.
Relevant roles: Project Managers, ScrumMasters, Business Analysts, Product Managers, Agile Coaches, Program Managers, and team members interested in Agile Project Management.
Iterations and Increments
Instead of spending months creating a perfect change plan (which is already obsolete by the time it is released), we start with a small prioritization phase to identify the biggest risk to our transformation and create an intervention designed to validate a single or set of strategic assumptions though experimentation. Every couple weeks the customer gets something of great value (working software), but it's also a great way to track progress (measuring the rate at which the team can turn user stories into production ready working software).
Related Resources
Show Summaries
Explaining the difference between increments and iterations and their implications for agile delivery.
Incremental and iterative development are not the same thing. Here is an explanation of the key difference and why agile is both, using Jeff Patton's famous example of the Mona Lisa and Karl Scotland's concept of fidelity.
A description of empiricism, how it is used and why it is so critical when practicing Scrum.
Learn how to use the Scrum cycle to create a product with the right features and the right user experience (UX).
Scrum is a simple framework based on the idea of inspect and adapt: Create a product increment, show it to the stakeholders, and use the feedback to see if the right product is developed. This post describes what Roman Pichler regards as the essence of Scrum: a cyclic three-step process. It shows how the three steps help create a product with the right features and the right user experience (UX).
The sprint backlog is a list of tasks that must be completed during a Scrum sprint.
The Sprint Backlog is a list of tasks to complete during a delivery, created from selected items of the product backlog. In this video/article description of Scrum Tools, Mike Cohn details how teams may tweak the sprint backlog as sprints move forward, some do-and-don'ts, and the usages of the burn-down chart. This resource is part of a 19-part Scrum Foundations video series available on the Mountain Goat site.
Working in a fact-based, experience-based, and evidence-based manner.
In this minimalistic article, Hiren Doshi shares his view of the three pillars of empiricism: Adaptation, Inspection, and Transparency. As the author points out, Scrum works not because of its structure or practices, but by adhering to the underlying principles of iterative, value-based incremental delivery by frequently gathering customer feedback and embracing change.
Methods and Concepts
Related Resources
An introduction to the basics of the Kanban System.
Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. It enables a shared understanding of the issues and progress of current work and the next immediate task priorities. In this resource the authors explore all the basics of Kanban, including its principles, practices, background and usage in lean-agile environments. Complete with videos and clear images, it is highly recommended for novices and experts alike.
Describing various Agile design principles and practices in-depth.
Describes Agile Design principles and practices in-depth, including refactoring, restructuring, clean-code, simple code, technical debt, incremental design, design principles, design patterns, emrgenet design, domain-driven design, evolutionary architecture.
Explaining what Agile really means in daily practice.
The definitions of Agile in the context of software development vary, but few focus on what it means in daily practice. In this to-the-point article, Barry Overeem shares his favorite definitions of Agile, the 7 principles of Continuous Innovation and an example video from the video by the Nordstrom Innovation Lab that put's it all into practice. It will help you grasp the concept of Agile Software Development better.
How Kanban can help you get a handle on your volume of work by unhiding it and improving your flow.
Is your team under constant pressure to meet delivery dates and increase efficiency? Brendan Wovchko explains how using Kanban gives you the visibility you need to streamline your IT operations. You'll learn how to: 1) Prioritize work more effectively; 2) Manage stakeholder expectations; 3) Use Lean metrics to remove waste. Only when you’re dealing with the true state of your work can you identify ways to accelerate your delivery.
Transforming the part of the value stream that corresponds to the development of options, order management or product discovery into elements ready for delivery.
Differentiating between continuous (kaizen) and radical (kaikaku) improvement.
The Kanban Method helps teams maximize productivity by creating a flow from request to delivery of value. Jurgen Appelo argues that Kanban's ability to handle continuous, evolutionary, and incremental improvement (kaizen) may prevent from being a great choice for discontinuous, revolutionary, and radical improvement (kaikaku). The best tools are always great in context, and he shares his reasoning and alternative solutions.
The books cover all eight areas of the Scrum Master competency model.
This handy list of books is categorized by each of the eight areas of the Scrum Master competency model developed by the Agile Coaching Institute. Whether you have questions regarding the practice, coaching, facilitating, teaching, mentoring, or mastering either technical, transformation or business settings - this list from Illia Pavlichenko will provide you with key resources to get started with.
Process Optimization
Identify the value stream and reduce waste by 1) streamlining the work process to avoid unnecessary gates, process steps, procedures, or bureaucracy; 2) organize the workplace and data to minimize time needed to find information and perform development activities; and 3) standardizing work by establishing a common way of doing things – a standard process, document templates, checklists, etc.
Related Resources
Demonstrating how keeping people busy does not necessarily result in higher throughput, and how it mostly depends on flow.
An excellent and brief visual demonstration of the impact of flow on throughput. As Henrik Kniberg puts it, "when you focus on keeping people busy, what you get is a bunch of busy people". By focusing on throughput, this short lesson shows the difference between push and pull, and how much work is actually completed by using various methods.
Making the case to stop starting and start finishing, analyzing the negative effects of context switching.
In this brilliant visualization, Henrik Kniberg shows the effects of context switching and how even a perfect multitasker will deliver results two to three times slower than someone that does not switches projects back and forth.
Strategies for dramatically improving flow using Theory of Constraints, by applying 3 different strategies to the bottleneck.
In this mind-blowing demonstration you will see three different ways to handle the flow of water out of a glass bottle. During the experiment, Arrie van Niekerk, one of the leading TOC Experts, shows the strategies for dramatically improving flow using Theory of Constraints. By comparing the different flows and understanding the natural movements that are created, you will understand the potential improvements that can be unlocked if the right strategy is applied at the bottleneck.
7 Strategies For Jumping Over The Compliance Hurdle
Compliance regulations exist for a good reason. They protect the customers and investors from unvalidated risks, and increase trust in potential customers. Regulations in industries are often seen as roadblocks to innovation, and Erwin De beuckelaer shares 7 practical strategies that demonstrate that compliance is more an aid than a hurdle for your innovation projects. In his view, not every risk is worth taking but some risks can be calculated.
Understand how systems with queues behave in the R&D domain.
Queuing theory is specially relevant in large scale environments since traditional batches of work have a non-linear impact on cycle time. Understand how systems with queues behave in the R&D domain, and apply those insights to managing queue sizes, work-in-progress limits, multitasking, work packages, and variability.
Audit requirements and strict compliance processes can be handled with the right Agile method.
When faced with audit requirements and compliance, companies can dismiss Agile - and its focus on working software over comprehensive documentation. The author has found it more meaningful to focus on the types of regulation and reporting teams are facing - they are either descriptive or prescriptive. Agile, he has found, can create more empowered teams who embrace both types, optimize their work while meeting all regulatory requirements.
Scheduling
To purpose of scheduling is to minimize the production time and costs while meeting customer's due dates for delivery.
Related Resources
Managers ask it. Developers hate it. Know why that is and what you should be asking instead.
Exploring the relationship between the need for "idle time" and increasing productive capacity in Kanban.
Tracking and Monitoring
Evaluate how well you are achieving your goals, improving performance, taking actions. Put processes in place to help you establish standards, so you can measure, compare, and make decisions.
Related Resources
Exploring what can happen when teams get fixated on “velocity” metric, and lessons to avoid this anti-pattern.
Going beyond information about status of work, and spotting issues the team may be facing - all with a quick glance.
Cumulative Flow Diagrams can be extracted automagically from many issue-tracking tools, and this simple graph can shed a light on a plethora of information about the team and its work style. From a single diagram, Pawel Brodzinski shows how we can identify common patterns and deduce what the team can be struggling with. A master class on team tracking - make sure to read the comments for more insights.
Turn raw kanban data into actionable flow metrics.
A different take on a related post by Daniel Vacanti, where he shares how to collect data, and to calculate cycle time and throughput, this article focuses on how to turn data into meaningful flow metrics by calculating the cycle time using start and finish times of work items. The calculation helps with prediction of completion time, and measuring the overall performance of your process.
How do you turn your data into meaningful flow metrics
Part of a series of posts from Daniel Vacanti, where he shares how to collect data, and to calculate cycle time and throughput, this article focuses on how to turn data into meaningful flow metrics by calculating the cycle time using start and finish times of work items. The calculation helps with prediction of completion time, and measuring the overall performance of your process.
Knowing when you are “Done” frames the work to be undertaken.
In Scrum each iteration - or Sprint - should yield a valuable product increment of release quality. Ian Mitchell advises that an understanding of what makes an increment truly releasable - and therefore genuinely “Done” - provides transparency over the work a Development Team plans to do, and the tasks it brings into progress. Work nearly done puts the team in technical debt, which must be repaid at compounding rates of interest.
Organizing & Planning Work
Management involves choosing appropriate goals and actions to pursue and then determining what strategies to use, what actions to take, and deciding what resources are needed to achieve the goals. This is followed by establishing worker relationships and processes to achieve the organizational goals.
Related Resources
The Daily Scrum serves to create transparency over the progress towards the Sprint Goal and provides the development team an opportunity to inspect and adapt.
Understanding the ramifications of the decisions we make with respect to what is fixed, what is firm, and what is flexible about scope, schedule and resources.
When we work on projects with fixed dates, scopes, and resources, we run the risk of burning out our teams and compromising quality. Use the tradeoff matrix to agree with your stakeholders as to what you’ll do when things - almost inevitably - don’t go exactly as planned.
A look at 6 different types of Scrum Masters and how shared or dedicated they are with their teams.
The role of the Scrum Master can vary greatly depending on the context and the needs of the team. Consequently, there are various SM variations which adapt to specific situations. Andreea Gheorghiu shares her views on the pros and cons of each variation, and makes recommendations. Having someone look over the processes of a team and help it evolve is necessary, but it is equally necessary to maximize each SM's chance of success.
By putting these assumptions in place, discussions about prioritization become more focused on the work and how to make the best use of our scares capacity.
Story point represent the effort involved to deliver a product backlog item.
Story points are about time, since they exist in order to predict how much functionality can be delivered by what date. Time is what our bosses, clients and customers care about. In this article Mike Cohn examines how risk, uncertainty and complexity are factors that may influence the effort involved.
The mechanics of a Sprint, and how team members collaborate to produce an increment.
As the title indicates, in this article Ian Mitchell goes step-by-step at the mechanics of a Sprint - starting with the preparation, the first items to be delivered, and the day-to-day work to be done. The play-by-play goes all the way to the retrospective, looking at how team members are expected to collaborate through out the development process.
Performance Management
Performance management can focus on the performance of an organization, a department, an employee, or the processes in place to manage particular tasks. Performance management standards are generally organized and disseminated by senior leadership at an organization and by task owners, it can include specifying tasks and outcomes of a job, providing timely feedback and coaching, comparing employee's actual performance and behaviors with desired performance and behaviors, instituting rewards, etc. It is necessary to outline the role of each individual in the organization in terms of functions and responsibilities to ensure that performance management is successful.
Related Resources
How to effectively measure your agile transformation journey.
Output-based metrics, such as team velocity, is what most companies use to measure effectiveness - often overlooking the entire delivery system. Andy Cleff shares meaningful and healthy ways to gain insights into the business outcomes, outlining reasons to measure, its purpose, and anti-patterns.
Why most progress reports reflect effort instead of progress, the resulting effect it has in our industry, and what to do about it.
Production Systems
A production system comprises both the technological elements (machines and tools) and organizational behavior (division of labor and information flow). An individual production system is usually analyzed in the literature referring to a single business, therefore it's usually improper to include in a given production system the operations necessary to process goods that are obtained by purchasing or the operations carried by the customer on the sold products, the reason being simply that since businesses need to design their own production systems this then becomes the focus of analysis, modeling and decision making (also called "configuring" a production system).
Related Resources
Ensure that each Solution increment meets appropriate quality standards.
Built-in quality is a principle of the Agile Manifesto, a core principle of the Lean-Agile Mindset, and one of SAFe's core values. It helps avoid the cost of delays (CoDs) associated with recalls, rework, and fixing defects, and enables an enterprise to deliver new functionality with the shortest sustainable lead time. In this article SAFe dives into the five dimensions of built-in quality: flow and quality in architecture, code, system, and release systems.
Learn about the simple and elegant formula known as Little’s Law and apply it to a vast range of business management and team leadership scenarios.
The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game
The Scrum Guide contains the definition of Scrum, including roles, events, artifacts, and the rules that bind them together. Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.
Eliminate Waste
The seven wastes come from the principle of Lean Manufacturing, an idea with its origins in Japanese industry at the beginning of the 20th century. That may seem a long way from the software industry of today, but the lessons are just as applicable to modern software development. By eliminating the seven wastes from your process, you’ll soon find your delivery times improve.
Related Resources
Improving flow by limiting the team's work in progress.
Limiting WIP (Work In Progress) is the counter-intuitive notion that it is more productive to have individuals sit at the bench than initiate tasks over the imposed team limit. It feels unnatural to teams at first, so Stephen Franklin draws from experience to explain the common obstacles you’ll face when setting WIP limits, and tips for overcoming them.
Improving flow by limiting the team's work in progress.
Limiting WIP (Work In Progress) is the counter-intuitive notion that it is more productive to have individuals sit at the bench than initiate tasks over the imposed team limit. It feels unnatural to teams at first, so Stephen Franklin draws from experience to explain the common obstacles you’ll face when setting WIP limits, and tips for overcoming them.
Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Supply Chain Management involves the movement and storage of raw materials, of work-in-process inventory, and of finished goods as well as end to end order fulfillment from point of origin to point of consumption. Interconnected, interrelated or interlinked networks, channels and node businesses combine in the provision of products and services required by end customers in a supply chain.
Related Resources
Understanding the mathematics of queuing theory.
Managers who do not understand Little's Law often panic when they see long cycle times and perform the exact opposite intervention they should: they initiate more work. Their reasoning is that if things are taking too long, new items should be started as soon as possible in order to finish the bulk on time. But they ignore work-in-progress at their own peril, as Little's Law shows that the greater the quantity of work, the longer they take to finish on average.
Quality Management
Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Thus, quality can be defined as fitness for intended use or, in other words, how well the product performs its intended function.
Workforce Management
Workforce management includes all the activities needed to maintain a productive workforce, such as field service management, human resource management, performance and training management, data collection, recruiting, budgeting, forecasting, scheduling and analytics. It is directly responsible for producing and retaining the most talented employees available in the job market.
Facility Management
Facilities management is a professional management discipline focused on the efficient and effective delivery of support services for the organizations that it serves. Its objective is to coordinate demand and supply of every tangible asset that supports an organization, including real estate property, buildings, technical infrastructure, (HVAC), lighting, transportation, IT-services, furniture, custodial, grounds maintenance and other user-specific equipment and appliances.
FM covers these two main areas: 'Space and Infrastructure' (such as planning, design, workplace, construction, lease, occupancy, maintenance and furniture) and 'People and Organization' (such as catering, cleaning, ICT, HR, accounting, marketing, hospitality). The first refers to the physical built environment with focus on (work-) space and (building-) infrastructure. The second covers the people and the organization and is related to work psychology and occupational physiology.