Homer Simpson, Difficult Stakeholder
I am a firm believer that any situation in life or in business can be traced to an episode of either The Simpsons or Seinfeld. In The Simpsons season 2 episode “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou,” the...
View ArticleAdjusting To New Information
What does it mean for an organization to be agile? I don’t mean just in terms of agile software development, I mean for any team or company or group of people working toward any common goal. I tend to...
View ArticleDefining Proper Success Metrics on Business Objectives Models
The Business Objective Model (BOM) is one of the foundational models we use as part of the Seilevel requirements methodology. The BOM defines the rationale for doing a project. Every BOM has the...
View ArticlePretending Agile
It’s fun to ask a company or a team if they are using agile development methodologies. You might get a “no”, but you rarely get a “yes” that isn’t followed up with a “but…”. The “but” can be simple...
View ArticleManaging Product Backlogs in Diverse Agile Environments
Managing a Product Backlog when there is only one development team in an organization creating one solution at a time is relatively straight forward. However, large enterprises have multiple...
View ArticleProduct Roadmaps for Internal Software Products
When I was a product manager for a commercial software company, one of the things that we regularly created was product roadmaps. These were tied to the vision for the product, and how we thought we...
View ArticleAgile Requirements Document
At Seilevel, on our Agile projects we have introduced a project artifact called the Agile Requirements Document or ARD that we create during the planning phase of a project. We have done this on...
View ArticleThe Most Important Part of A User Story
The last couple of years has seen a wholesale shift in development methodologies among the Fortune 1000 companies from Waterfall to Agile. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Agile revolution...
View ArticleGathering Requirements in a Green Field
In my time at Seilevel, I’ve had a chance to work with a number of different clients, operating in a range of industries. Oftentimes, these clients begin projects with a number of legacy systems that...
View ArticleIgnore tasks, focus on decisions.
We all have our reasons for using a piece of software. Maybe it makes staying in touch easier, maybe it helps organize, or for that matter, make us money, maybe it’s just fun to interact with…whatever...
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