3 Agile Program Problems...and Possible Solutions

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Program Management   Testing/Test Management  

Programs (collections of projects with one business objective) can encounter all kinds of problems. Here are three that you may have seen—and what you can do as an agile program manager.

Problem 1: Everyone is on the program on Day 1. You’re sure you’ll need somewhere between 15 and 30 feature teams—eventually. But, your management doesn’t quite understand how to use an agile approach to assigning people or teams to the program. They give you all the people on Day 1, regardless of whether you have a program charter, a roadmap or anything.

You don’t need that many people right now. In fact, you’re not ready for them. What can you do?

Consider this possibility to help the teams learn how to work together:

1. Ask the people to create cross-functional feature teams of no more than seven people each. It’s best if every team was collocated, but sometimes that doesn’t work.
2. Now that people have organized themselves, ask them to select a unique set of defects from the backlog of defects. It doesn’t matter what product those defects belong to (you might need to let another project or program manager know you are asking people to fix defects). As long as every team has a backlog of defects, that’s what you want. This works even better when each team has a product owner, but each team doesn’t need one.
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