Posts tagged Product Owner

Product Management: The Time is Now

ProjectManagementFestival

We talk a lot in the lean/agile community about the crucial importance of the “product owner”—the Scrum term for the person who has ultimate responsibility for the product. Indeed, this person is the champion of the product—and that’s why I prefer the role name “product champion.” You need this person for any type of product (software, system, service, or a combination) and for any context of usage (whether your product is sold commercially or is used for internal IT).

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Cure Your Agile Planning and Analysis Blues: The Top 9 Pain Points

frazzledproductchampionIf you’re on a team that’s transitioning to lean/agile, have you experienced troubling truths, baffling barriers, and veritable vexations around planning and analysis? We work with many lean/agile teams, and we’ve noted certain recurring planning and analysis pain points.

Mary Gorman and I shared our top observations in a recent webinar. Our hostess, Maureen McVey, IIBA’s Head of Learning and Development, prompted us to begin by sharing why we wrote the book Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis and then explaining the essential practices you can learn by reading the book.

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Lean/Agile Books to Enjoy and Learn From


I love books, and I read a lot of them.

Books help me learn about new tools and techniques to add to my toolkit. I also read books to reinforce and confirm practices that work, to challenge my thinking, and to discover new colleagues to connect with.

The problem? So many books, so little time. So I’ve curated a short list of five 2012 lean/agile books that I’ve found valuable, challenging, and useful.

[Oh… and did I mention my own new book, written with Mary Gorman: Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. 😉 ]

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Essential Agile Business Analysis

For years and years we’ve coached and trained teams how to elicit, analyze, and manage requirements for software development projects. We also work on projects—so our coaching and training is based on real project work. We’ve just written a book on agile product planning and analysis. Now that so many organizations adopting Agile as the method of choice, what about requirements? Is there a need for analyzing requirements in Agile?

That was the theme of our June Webinar titled (spoiler alert!) “Business Analysis Is Essential to Agile Success” (use training@ebgconsulting.com to login). For our blog eNewsletter readers, here’s the nugget: requirements drive agile teams!

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Agile Analysis, Agile Testing: Synergies for Successful Software Solutions

My experiences working with agile teams have taught me that agile analysis and testing skills are truly synergestic.

So much so, that I put together a tutorial for the April 2011 Quest Conference (Quality Engineering Software & Testing) entitled, “Requirements Exploration with Tester Collaboration”. Subsequently, I had the honor to work with agile testing guru Janet Gregory to present this at Agile 2011.

Next month, EBG’er Sue Burk will co-present this tutorial with Janet at Software Testing Analysis & Review (STAR) conferences. So, you might be wondering, what are those synergies?

The Testing Mindset

Product needs evolve into requirements that define what will be built, what will be tested, and how the product needs will provide value for the organization. People with testing skills need to be involved in requirements for the same reason the other product stakeholders need to be involved: to boost the team’s ability to deliver a high-quality product.

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Agile Requirements Exploration with Tester Collaboration

I’m thrilled to be collaborating with Janet Gregory, co-author with Lisa Crispin of Agile Testing, on a workshop entitled “Agile Requirements Exploration with Tester Collaboration” at Agile 2011 Conference and STARWEST.

I believe that there is a lot of cross-fertilization benefit to be gained when people with skills in different disciplines collaborate closely toward shared ends. This is very true for the disciplines of testing and business analysis. The tester mind-set is crucial for verifying requirements. The business analysis mind-set is crucial for validating requirements.

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This Week’s Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop: 2 Days of Learning in Las Vegas

I was recently interviewed by SearchSoftwareQuality editor Yvette Francino about this week’s Business Analysis and Requirements Workshop at the Better Conference/Development Conference this week in Las Vegas, Nevada (6-7 June, 2011).

Yvette asked me to explain the logistics, if we would be emulating gathering requirements for a particular project and if the workshop be relevant regardless of domain area. Here are my answers: As conference chair,

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