02 | Enterprise agile business, part I

Steven Borg | Co-founder and Strategist, Northwest Cadence

Andrew Clear | ALM Consultant, Northwest Cadence
Module Overview

• Batch sizing: scaling up decomposition

• Prioritization: scaling up the product backlog
Decomposition
What team-level agile says
• Small stories
• Each product backlog item or
user story must deliver real
customer value
• Iterations must produce
potentially shippable increments
Why that’s hard to scale
• When stakeholders demand large
features or big scope, teams
struggle to break down work
• Cross-team dependencies
increase cycle time
• Integration and regression testing
can be slow and expensive
Working in Small Batches

• Think Minimum Viable Product

– Create the smallest thing you can to get targeted
feedback from your customers
• Getting this feedback is pointless if you don’t use it to make a decision

• Build T-shaped teams & embrace de-architecting

• Drive down transaction costs with automation
– Testing, deployments
• Prioritize & Define Done
Product Backlog
What team-level agile says
• Prioritized and order-optimized
team backlog
• “Smallest indivisible piece of
customer value”
Why that’s hard to scale
• Too granular for high-level
decision-makers
• Complex and conflicting value
considerations hard to stack rank
• Difficult to visualize across many
backlogs, even with great tools
• Dependencies complicate
ordering
• Sometimes it’s ‘buckets’, not flow
Prioritize on Purpose

• … or else you’re surely doing it by accident

• Define done at all levels to avoid feature creep
• Weighted shortest job first works at any level
• Translate value considerations to cost of delay
To do Doing Done
Executive level
<XOR>
Ideas are refined, prioritized, budgeted,
resourced, tracked through realization

To do (3) Doing (4) Ready (3) In Prod

Management level
Epics are defined, decomposed into
stories, prioritized, and pulled by teams

DoD: defined by
management

To do (3) Design (2) Dev (3) Test (2) Done

Teams level
Stories are implemented; teams self-
organize within a common cadence
To do (6) Doing (6) Done
Q&A
©2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Office, Azure, System Center, Dynamics and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or
trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this
presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee
the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN
THIS PRESENTATION.