forecasting Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Daniel Westermayr: Trusting Your Agile Team, The Foundation of Great Product Ownership

The Great Product Owner: Trusting Your Team, The Foundation of Great Product Ownership

In this segment, Daniel discusses the importance of the “leap of faith” that great POs take by letting go of control and trusting their team to deliver. By believing in their team, great POs are able to motivate and focus their team’s efforts. Daniel also mentions the NoEstimates movement and the idea that a forecast is a range rather than a single number. Great POs do not second guess their team or the data, and are willing to accept the team’s delivery even if they don’t fully understand it.

The Bad Product Owner: How to Help Your Product Owner Succeed by Saying “No” When Necessary

In this segment, Daniel discusses the tendency Product Owners have to say “yes” to everything in order to appease or please others, even if it means not properly prioritizing tasks. Daniel emphasizes the importance of understanding the PO’s perspective and using forecasting to help the PO say “no” when necessary. He also highlights the crucial role of Scrum Masters in helping the PO prioritize and say “no.” The ability for organizations to hear and accept “no” is also a key factor in mitigating this anti-pattern. Daniel encourages POs to say “no” when necessary and reassures them that it is possible to change their mind later.

The Ultimate Guide to Supporting Product Owners as a Scrum Master

Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.

About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Daniel Westermayr: Moving Beyond Roadmaps, and Using Data to Drive Decision Making for Agile Product Development

In this episode, Daniel emphasizes the importance of collecting data from day one in product development. He discusses how data can help assess the capability of the system in place and create forecasts to assess delivery dates. He mentions the NoEstimates movement and suggests counting the product backlog items that can be finalized in one sprint as a useful metric. Daniel also provides tips for helping teams accept the data, and continuously updating forecasts. He emphasizes the need to work in hypotheses rather than requirements, as it allows for acceptance that they may be wrong. Finally, he notes that data gives us information on how to act and change over time.

Want to Improve Your Change Management Results? Discover the Lean Change Management Approach Today!

As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

BONUS: The art, and science of making prediction with #NoEstimates. With Dan Vacanti and Marcus Hammarberg

We explore a real-life project that Marcus was part of, and how the #NoEstimates methods he used helped him make predictions, even if did not estimate the work to be done.

This conversation started from an article that Marcus had posted earlier on social media. In that article Marcus explained how he had used data, as opposed to estimates to make a prediction of when the project would be finished. This approach still creates a lot of controversy on twitter, even if it has been (at the time of recording) 10+ years since the original discussion around estimates started by Woody Zuill and Vasco Duarte on twitter under the tags of #NoEstimates and #Estwaste respectively.

As Marcus quickly found out in this project, the rate of progress could not have been predicted easily at the start (if at all). When he first started the project, the progress was swift, but at one point he faced a problem he could not solve for several days. This phenomenon is not new for any programmers in the audience, and is quite common. Also, one of the reasons why using methods like #NoEstimates (as explained in the #NoEstimates book, and in Marcus’ blog post), can help uncover information that estimation would not.

Dealing with surprises: the information you need to share with stakeholders

Continue reading BONUS: The art, and science of making prediction with #NoEstimates. With Dan Vacanti and Marcus Hammarberg