Topic Title: Governance for Agile Teams: Dev & Non-Dev (Choosing and prioritizing projects)
Initiator: Mary Chang
Participants: Sarah Urriste, Bill Dean, Chris Teeples, Serg Ivanov, Mike Miller, Kevin Tighe, Jen Molitor
Discussion Highlights:
- The project prioritization process used to consist of “whoever screams the loudest wins”
- Now a Governance committee decides whether something should be approved or not.
- How do we decide something should go to the committee? The goal is to keep as much out of that as possible
- What they did: They went to Gartner and took their 25 questions and narrowed it down to three, and they weighted each question on a scale of 1-5:
- How risky is it? Is it a risk of NOT implementing or implementing?
- What is the scope? Does it impact only 1 client (1) or all (5)?
- Complexity (based on General complexity, technical complexity, political complexity)
- The impact point for sending to the committee is a score of 11 or greater, which is the inflection point that provides high value to a lot of people
- Medium Complexity: It goes to Program level governance
- Low Complexity goes to a team’s backlog and the PO prioritizes
- They have a weekly concept proposals meeting to go over all proposals.
- If a proposal is approved, a business case is created and for highly complex proposal it goes to investment proposal
- Scoring is based on strategic goals and the score is averaged
- A detailed paper on prioritization: Prioritization research paper from University of Wisconsin. It’s cumbersome but gives you enough variance and flexibility to prioritize (suggestion from a participant)
- Cutting projects @ a small vertical slice: Make it do ONLY one thing and you’re delivering value at an MVP lvl
Ideas for Action/Next Steps:
- If you do nothing else, score the Cost of Delay!
- Stakeholders must agree on a set of criteria and prioritization model in order for it to work
- Ask stakeholders to try something for 90 days before they give up on it
- The reason to use prioritization is to remove the “vague and fuzzy” so the stakeholders so the stakeholders can buy into the Prioritization “game” … everything in the world is Game Theory based (participant discussion)
- Contention between constraints will be taken to the executive level
- SAFe: Capability is your organization’s capacity to delivery on an opportunity. Dependencies should be managed @ the PMO/Portfolio level.
- End of life technology must also have a weighted score
- Time to Value should be considered and prioritized as well