Category: agile project management

Finding a Partner to Trust - Writing an Agile RFP to Outsource a SW Development Projects

October 22, 2008 by peterstev

My customer wanted to find an external partner to develop their new software product and develop using Scrum. So we needed to evaluate the potential partners, but how? The classical approach is to define the application “exactly”, then ask some potential vendors if they can do it and how much it will cost (and then haggle over the price). This is not very Scrum like, but it represents a starting point which is well understood by customers and vendors alike. What is different about an Agile RFP?

Prioritizing the Product Backlog

October 8, 2008 by peterstev

Any project plan is a mixture of what the product owner wants and what the team can actually deliver. The product owner naturally wants more than the team can deliver, so s/he has to prioritize in order to get something useful in the desired timeframe.

Once you have a prioritized product backlog, you have the prerequisites for calling the first Sprint Planning Meeting. How do you convert an unordered list of features into a prioritized product backlog which you can give the team to implement? What should you do first?

I’m not sure that there is a correct answer to this question. It will depend on your product, your company and your situation. Let’s take a look at some widely used strategies for prioritizing the product backlog

• Minimum Marketable Feature Set - the first pass to narrow the list of stories
• Business Value First - Focus on High Value Functions
• Bang For the Buck - Go for easy wins
• Technical Risk First - Do the hard things first
• Defer Risk - Do the hard things later (or never)
• Vote - Ask your users