Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop

Strengthen product management in your organization through effective executive leadership by focusing on product teams, core capabilities, and proper alignment.

Objective of this workshop

To develop a common understanding and foundation for product management so we, as leaders, better understand how to lead product owners, product managers, and their teams.

Enable Product Delivery - Executive Leadership Workshop

Learn how enterprise agility can provide lasting value to the organization

Clarify your role in supporting your teams to deliver lasting value to stakeholders and customers

1. Understanding Your Top Challenges
   • Define your challenges, goals, and opportunities Agile and product management will impact.
2. Transitioning from Projects to Product-centric Delivery
   • Understand the shift from fixed delivery to continuous improvement and delivery of value.
3. Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
   • Organizations need to embrace change and leverage smaller delivery cycles.
4. Defining Your "Products" and Product Management
   • Define products in your culture and how to empower product delivery teams.
5. Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
   • Use product ownership to drive increased ROI into your product delivery teams and lifecycles.
6. Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
   • Define the actions and changes you must make for this transformation to be successful.

Your Product Transformation Journey

1. Make the Case for Product Delivery
   • Align your organization with the practices to deliver what matters most
2. Enable Product Delivery – Executive Workshop
   • One-day executive workshop – align and prepare your leadership
   • Audience: Senior executives and IT leadership.
     Size: 8-16 people
     Time: 6 hours
3. Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
   • Enhance product backlogs, roadmapping, and strategic alignment
   • Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
     Size: 10-20 people
     Time: 3-4 days
4. Deliver Your Digital Products at Scale
   • Scale Product Families to Align Enterprise Goals
   • Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
     Size: 10-20 people
     Time: 3-4 days
5. Mature and Scale Product Ownership
   • Align and mature your product owners
   • Audience: Product Owners/Mangers
     Size: 8-16 people
     Time: 2-4 days

Repeat workshops with different companies, operating units, departments, or teams as needed.

What is a workshop?

We WILL ENGAGE in discussions and activities:

• Flexible, to accommodate the needs of the group.
• Open forum for discussion and questions.
• Share your knowledge, expertise, and experiences (roadblocks and success stories).
• Everyone is part of the process.
• Builds upon itself.

This workshop will NOT be:

• A lecture or class.
• A monologue that never ends.
• Technical training.
• A presentation.
• Us making all the decisions.

Roles within the workshop

We each have a role to play to make our workshop successful!

Facilitators

• Introduce the best practice framework used by Info-Tech.
• Ask questions about processes, procedures, and assumptions.
• Guide for the methodology.
• Liaison for any other relevant Info-Tech research or services.

Participants

• Contribute and speak out as much as needed.
• Provide expertise on the current processes and technology.
• Ask questions.
• Provide feedback.
• Collaborate and work together to produce solutions.

Understanding Your Top Challenges

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Products are the lifeblood of an organization. They deliver the capabilities needed to deliver value to customers, internal users, and stakeholders.
• The shift to becoming a product organization is intended to continually increase the value you provide to the broader organization as you grow and evolve.
• You need to clearly convey the direction and strategy of your product portfolio to gain alignment, support, and funding from your organization.

Common Obstacles

• IT organizations are traditionally organized to deliver initiatives in specific periods of time. This conflicts with product delivery, which continuously delivers value over the lifetime of a product.
• Delivering multiple products together creates additional challenges because each product has its own pedigree, history, and goals.
• Product owners struggle to prioritize changes to deliver product value. This creates a gap and conflict between product and enterprise goals.

Info-Tech's Approach

Info-Tech's approach will guide you through:

• Understanding the top challenges driving your product initiative.
• Improving your transitioning from projects to product-centric delivery.
• Enhancing enterprise agility and the value of change.
• Defining products and product management in your context.
• Connecting product management to Agile practices.
• Committing to empowering Agile Product teams.

What is driving your organization to become product focused?

30 minutes

• Team introductions:
  • Share your name and role
  • What are the key challenges you are looking to solve around product management?
  • What blockers or challenges will we need to overcome?

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Input

• Organizational knowledge
• Goals and challenges

Output

• List of key challenges
• List of workshop expectations
• Parking lot items

Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

Define the differences between projects and product delivery

30 minutes

• Consider project delivery and product delivery.
• Discussion:
  • What are some differences between the two?

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Input

• Organizational knowledge
• Internal terms and definitions

Output

• List of differences between projects and product delivery

Define the differences between projects and product delivery

15 minutes

Input

• Organizational knowledge
• Internal terms and definitions

Output

• List of differences between projects and product delivery

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Identify the differences between a project-centric and a product-centric organization

Info-Tech Insight

Product delivery requires significant shifts in the way you complete development work and deliver value to your users. Make the changes that support improving end user value and enterprise alignment.

Projects can be a mechanism for funding product changes and improvements

Projects within products

Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a "product-based" or "project-based" shop, the same basic principles should apply.

You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.

You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

While Agile and product are intertwined, they are not the same!

Delivering products does not necessarily require an Agile mindset. However, Agile methods help facilitate the journey because product thinking is baked into them.

Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy

In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?"

Info-Tech Insight

The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.

Product delivery realizes value for your product family

While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

What is business agility?

Business Agility enables you to:

• Deliver value quickly
• Rapidly respond to change

Delivering the Right Value at the Right Time to the Right Stakeholders

Leveraging the minimum viable products (MVPs)

Delivering in Waterfall

Delivering via Agile/Iterative

Iterations maximize value delivery

Iterations reduce accumulated risk

Defining Your Products and Product Management in Your Context

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

What is a product?

A tangible solution, tool, or service (physical or digital) that enables the long-term and evolving delivery of value to customers and stakeholders based on business and user requirements.

Info-Tech Insight

A proper definition of a product recognizes three key facts.

1. A clear recognition that products are long-term endeavors that don't end after the project finishes.
2. Products are not just "apps," but can be software or services that drive value.
3. There is more than one stakeholder group that derives value from the product or service.

What is a product? Who are your consumers?

30 minutes

• Discussion:
  • How do you define a product, service, or application?
  • Who are the consumers that receive value from the product?
  • Add your definition to slide 6 in your Enabling Product Delivery Outcomes deck.

Input

• Organizational knowledge
• Internal terms and definitions

Output

• Our definition of products and services
• Our definition of product and service consumers/customers

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Products and services share the same foundation and best practices

The term "product" is used for consistency but would apply to services as well.

Product = Service

"Product" and "service" are terms that each organization needs to define to fit its culture and customers (internal and external). The most important aspect is consistent use and understanding of:

• External products
• Internal products
• External services
• Internal services
• Products as a service (PaaS)
• Productizing services (SaaS)

Recognize the different product owner perspectives

"A product owner in its most beneficial form acts like an entrepreneur, like a 'mini-CEO.' The product owner is someone who really 'owns' the product."
– Robbin Schuurman,
"Tips for Starting Technical Product Managers"

Info-Tech Best Practice

Product owners must translate needs and constraints from their perspective into the language of their audience. Kathy Borneman, Digital Product Owner at SunTrust Bank, noted the challenges of finding a common language between lines of business and IT (e.g. what is a unit?).

Define product management to match your culture and customers

Characteristics of a discrete product

• Has end users or consumers
• Delivers quantifiable value
• Evolves or changes over time
• Has predictable delivery
• Has definable boundaries
• Has a cost to produce and operate

What does not need product ownership?

• Individual features
• Transactions
• Unstructured data
• One-time solutions
• Non-repeatable processes
• Solutions that have no users or consumers
• People or teams

Need help defining your products or services? Download our blueprint Transition From Project to Product Delivery.

Implement the Info-Tech product owner capability model

Unfortunately, most product owners operate with an incomplete knowledge of the skills and capabilities needed to perform the role. Common gaps include focusing only on product backlogs, acting as a proxy for product decisions, and ignoring the need for key performance indicators (KPIs) and analytics in both planning and value realization.

Scale products to improve alignment

Operationally align product delivery to enterprise goals

The Info-Tech difference:

1. Start by piloting product families to determine which approaches work best for your organization.
2. Create a common definition of what a product is and identify products in your inventory.
3. Use scaling patterns to build operationally aligned product families.
4. Develop a roadmap strategy to align families and products to enterprise goals and priorities.
5. Use products and families to evaluate delivery and organizational design improvements.

Select the right models for scaling product management

Pyramid

• Logical hierarchy of products rolling into a single service area.
• Lower levels of the pyramid focus on more discrete services.
• Example: Human resources mapping down to supporting applications.

Service Grouping

• Organization of related services into service family.
• Direct hierarchy does not necessarily exist within the family.
• Example: End user support and ticketing.

Technical Grouping

• Logical grouping of IT infrastructure, platforms, or applications.
• Provides full lifecycle management when hierarchies do not exist.
• Example: Workflow and collaboration tools.

Market Alignment

• Grouping of products by customer segments or market strategy.
• Aligns product to end users and consumers.
• Example: Customer banking products and services.

Organizational Alignment

• Used at higher levels of the organization where products are aligned under divisions.
• Separation of product management from organizational structure no longer distinct.

Identify shared service products

Align to demand from other product managers

Shared products and services provide enabling capabilities for other products. A shared service technical product manager needs to understand all the sources of demand from other technical product managers, define clear criteria for prioritizing changes, and coordinate releases to align with other technical product manager roadmaps.

Product delivery realizes value for your product family

While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

Leverage the product family roadmap for alignment

It's more than a set of colorful boxes. It's the map to align everyone to where you are going.

Your product family roadmap

• Lays out a strategy for your product family.
• Is a statement of intent for your family of products.
• Communicates direction for the entire product family and product teams.
• Directly connects to the organization's goals.

However, it is not:

• Representative of a hard commitment.
• A simple combination of your current product roadmaps.

Your ideal roadmap approach is a spectrum, not a choice!

Match your roadmap and backlog to the needs of the product

Product Managers do not have to choose between being tactical or strategic.
– Aha!, 2015

Multiple roadmap views can communicate differently, yet tell the same truth

Before connecting your family roadmap to products, think about what each roadmap typically presents

Info-Tech Insight

Your product family roadmap and product roadmap tell different stories. The product family roadmap represents the overall connection of products to the enterprise strategy, while the product roadmap focuses on the fulfillment of the product's vision.

Typical elements of a product family roadmap

While there are others, these represent what will commonly appear across most family-based roadmaps.

Connecting your product family roadmaps to product roadmaps

Your product and product family roadmaps should be connected at an artifact level that is common between both. Typically, this is done with capabilities, but it can be done at a more granular level if an understanding of capabilities isn't available.

Your communication objectives are linked to your audience; ensure you know your audience and speak their language

Adapted from: Martin Fowler

Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy

In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals while aligning your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?"

Info-Tech Insight

The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.

Business value is a key component to drive better decision making

Better Decisions

• Balanced Business Value
• Other Criteria
• Other Criteria
• Other Criteria
• Other Criteria
• Other Criteria

Get a clear picture of how your products and services drive customer and business value

Value cannot always be represented by revenue or reduced expenses. However, the full spectrum of sources of values is not always apparent or obvious. See the many ways in which a product or service can bring value to your organization.

Business Value Matrix	Our Value Matrix

Financial Benefits vs. Improved Capabilities

• Improved capabilities refers to the enhancement of business capabilities and skill sets.
• Financial benefits refers to the degree to which the value source can be measured through monetary metrics and is often highly tangible.

Inward vs. Outward Orientation

• Inward refers to value sources that have an internal impact on an organization's effectiveness and efficiency in performing its operations.
• Outward refers to value sources that come from interactions with external factors, such as the market or your customers.

Demonstrate Value
(Return on Investment)

Products and services that are specifically related to the impact on an organization's ability to create a return on investment.

Reduce Costs

Products and services that reduce overhead. They typically are less related to broad strategic vision or goals and more simply limit expenses that would occur had the product or service not been put in place.

Enhance Services

Products and services tahat enable business capabilities and improve an organization's ability to perform its internal operations.

Reach Customers

Products and services that enable and improve the interaction with customers or produce practical market information and insights.

What is a value score?

What is a balanced value score?

Build your Balanced Business Value Score using four key value drivers

Identify enablers and blockers of product ownership

15 minutes

1. Brainstorm and discuss the key enablers that can help promote and ease your implementation of product ownership.
2. Brainstorm and discuss the key blockers (or risks) that may interrupt or derail your efforts.
3. Brainstorm mitigation activities for each blocker.

Input

• Understanding of current products

Output

• List of factors that can improve business agility

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Guiding Principles

Guiding principles provide your teams with rules, goals, or themes to help frame and direct decisions.

Articulate how product management will support the strategic priorities of the business with a set of product management principles

How to determine your product management principles:

1. Review your product strategy, organization's goals, and the organization's target state maturity level.
2. Describe your target state for product management.
3. What are the goals and constraints that will help you achieve your target state? These are your product management guiding principles.

Define a set of guiding principles for product management

30 minutes

• Create a statement describing your target state or destination postcard. Discuss the guiding principles of product management. Your guiding principles are constraints, goals, and checkpoints for product management.

Input

• Stakeholder and team expectations
• Understanding of organization culture
• Enterprise strategy and priorities

Output

• Guiding principles for product management

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

Introduction: Traditional solution delivery (Waterfall)

• Each step is done sequentially, one after the other.
• Next step cannot start until the previous step is 100% complete.
• Very difficult to go backward.
• Feels like construction.

What did Royce really say about Waterfall?

Agile isn't as radical or new as you might think.

Royce's 5 Principles for Success

1. Complete program design first.
2. Keep documentation current and complete.
3. Iterate within each phase, often repeatedly.
   • Dr. Winston W. Royce first introduced the Waterfall process back in 1970.
   • However, he noted:
   • I believe in this concept, but the implementation described above is risky and invites failure.

• Plan, control, and monitor testing throughout.
• Involve the customer formally, in-depth, and continually.

Source: "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems"

Waterfall vs. Agile – How are they different?

Waterfall	Agile
A "one and done" approach (planning & documentation based). Elapsed time to deliver any value: Months to years.	An "iterative" approach (empirical/evidence based). Elapsed time to deliver any value: Weeks.

Agile is NOT just lots of mini-Waterfalls!!! Going from Waterfall to Agile is like…

• Going from running a relay race to doing a Navy Seal log carry
• Skills required are very different
• The transition can be difficult
• You will have to start slow and learn as you go
• It's about empowering and protecting the health of the team
• The power of Agile comes from harnessing the power of the team
• But a new team will never be at peak efficiency from the start
• You will have to learn to be more Agile as you go

DVIDSHub

Agile's four core values

"…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
– The Agile Manifesto

Be aware of common myths around Agile

Agile does not . . . .

1. …solve development and communication issues.
2. …ensure you will finish requirements faster.
3. …mean you don't need planning and documentation!

"Although Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in globally distributed settings, there is no panacea for success."
– "Negotiating Common Ground in Distributed Agile Development: A Case Study Perspective."

"Without proper planning, organizations can start throwing more resources at the work, which spirals into the classic Waterfall issues of managing by schedule."
– Kristen Morton, Associate Implementation Architect,
OneShield Inc., Info-Tech Interview

Projects can be a mechanism for funding product releases

Projects within products

Regardless of whether you recognize yourself as a "product-based" or "project-based" shop, the same basic principles should apply.

You go through a period or periods of project-like development to build a version of an application or product.

You also have parallel services along with your project development, which encompass the more product-based view. These may range from basic support and maintenance to full-fledged strategy teams or services like sales and marketing.

A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

Detailed Appropriately: PBIs are broken down and refined as necessary.
Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.
Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.
Prioritized: The PBI's value and priority are determined at each tier.

Backlog tiers facilitate product planning

Ranging from the intake of an idea to a PBI ready for development; to enter the backlog, each PBI must pass through a given quality filter.

Each activity is a variation of measuring value and estimating effort in order to validate and prioritize a PBI.

A PBI successfully completes an activity and passes through to the next backlog tier when it meets the appropriate criteria. Quality filters should exist between each tier.

Use quality filters to ensure focus on the most important PBIs

Expand the definitions of "ready" and "done" to include the other stages of a PBI's journey through product planning.

Info-Tech Best Practice

A quality filter ensures quality is met and the appropriate teams are armed with the appropriate information to work more efficiently and improve throughput.

Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

Develop an adaptive governance process

	Embedded/Automated Governance Governance that is entrenched and automated into organizational processes and product/service design. Empowered and fully delegated governance to maintain fit and drive organizational success and survival.
	Agile Governance Governance that is flexible to support different needs and quick response in the organization. Driven by principles and is delegated throughout the company.
	Controlled Governance Governance focused on compliance and hierarchy-based, authority-driven control of decisions. Levels of authority are defined and often driven by regulatory requirements.
	Ad- Hoc Governance Governance that is not well defined or understood within the organization. It occurs out of necessity but often not by the right people or bodies

Five key principles for building an adaptive governance framework

Delegate and empower

Decision making must be delegated down within the organization, and all resources must be empowered and supported to make effective decisions.

Define outcomes

Outcomes and goals must be clearly articulated and understood across the organization to ensure decisions are in line and stay within reasonable boundaries.

Make risk-informed decisions

Integrated risk information must be available with sufficient data to support decision making and design approaches at all levels of the organization.

Embed/ automate

Governance standards and activities need to be embedded in processes and practices. Optimal governance reduces its manual footprint while remaining viable. This also allows for more dynamic adaptation.

Establish standards and behavior

Standards and policies need to be defined as the foundation for embedding governance practices organizationally. These guardrails will create boundaries to reinforce delegated decision making.

Maturing governance is a journey

Organizations should look to progress in their governance stages. Ad-hoc and controlled governance tends to be slow, expensive, and a poor fit for modern practices.

The goal as you progress in your stages is to delegate governance and empower teams to make optimal decisions in real-time, knowing that they are aligned with the understood best interests of the organization.

Automate governance for optimal velocity, while mitigating risks and driving value.

This puts your organization in the best position to be adaptive and able to react effectively to volatility and uncertainty.

Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

Your management culture

15 minutes

• How would you describe your organization's product and product delivery culture?
• Add words or short phrases that describe your organization's culture to the quadrant where it fits best.
• Is the value more focused on company outcomes or people/staff outcomes?
• Is your description more about what is happening right now (actual) or about what is possible or could be (possible)?
• Add your item along each axis to the degree that access describes it.

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Input

• Previous slides and activities
• Organizational knowledge

Output

• An inventory of where you are supporting a product culture and where you are not

Your management culture

15 minutes

Input

• Previous slides and activities
• Organizational knowledge

Output

• An inventory of where you are supporting a product culture and where you are not

Reminder: Agile's for core values

"…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
– Source: The Agile Manifesto

We value. . .

Give sufficient decision-making authority to your teams

• Push the decisions down to your product owners and delivery teams.
  Supporting team on technical decisions will remove the need for the approval processes, allowing teams to quickly adjust and implement changes.
• Bring your business stakeholders and subject matter experts together to identify potential high-level risks. Product owners need to incorporate stakeholder feedback into their decisions but should not be a proxy where the stakeholder holds authority.
• Agree to the level of acceptable business risk.
  Line of business stakeholders must trust their product owners to be able to make the appropriate decisions within the approved threshold.
• The success of the project is a reflection on both the delivery team and stakeholders.
  Product success is a balance between the needs and priorities of your product owner perspectives: business/technical/operational.

"Push the decision making down as far as possible, down to the point where sprint teams completely coordinate all the integration, development, and design. What I push up the management chain is risk taking. [Management] decides what level of risk they are willing to take and [they] demonstrate that by the amount of decision making you push down."
– Senior Manager, Canadian P&C
Insurance Company

Ensure long-term product success with management support

Changing to Agile can be perceived by management as a loss of control. Help them understand the benefits of improved communication, responsiveness, and cost containment.

Provide Constant Support

Rather than dictating timelines and scope, management will now support the team by helping to prioritize scope and resolving conflicting requirements amongst themselves.

Take a Hands-Off Approach

Once the scope is determined for a given iteration, management will not inject new requests until the current work is complete.

Be a Catalyst for Change

Management should encourage the move toward product management as a means of increasing development transparency.

What is servant leadership?

Principles of servant leadership

1. Empower the Team
   • Collaboration
   • Accountability
   • Trust team decisions
2. Support the Team
   • Clear obstacles
   • Secure resources
   • Free the team from outside interference
3. Listen to Understand
   • To understand, not to respond
   • Problems are best solved closest to the problem
   • Teams may not have all the information

Personal Stop, Start, and Continue

15 minutes

• What do you need to STOP, START, and CONTINUE to support Product Management and their authority to make product decisions?
  • List behaviors, actions, or beliefs that the organization will need to STOP.
  • List behaviors, actions, or beliefs that the organization will need to START.
  • List behaviors, actions, or beliefs that the organization will need to CONTINUE.
• Homework:
  • Update your Stop/Start/Continue goals quarterly.

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Input

• Organizational Stop, Start, and Continue list
• Previous slides and activities
• Organizational knowledge

Output

• List of personal factors needed to support Product Management

Personal Stop, Start, and Continue

There is no such thing as painless change

Ensure Focus
People must be able to focus on the new behaviors to make them patterns.

Understand Expectations
People need to shape their own expectations to make the change.

Develop Practice
Individuals must commit to and repeat practices that will make the change stick.

Use CLAIM to guide your journey

	Culture Value is best created by self-managing teams that deliver in frequent, short increments supported by leaders who coach them through challenges.
	Learning Product-centric delivery and Agile are a radical change in how people work and think. Structured, facilitated learning is required throughout the transformation to help leaders and practitioners make the shift.
	Automation Product Management, Agile, and DevOps have inspired SDLC tools that have become a key part of delivery practices and work management.
	Integrated Teams Self-organizing teams that cross business, delivery, and operations are essential to gain the full benefits of product-centric delivery.
	Metrics and Governance Successful implementations require the disciplined use of metrics that support developing better teams.

Communicate reasons for changes and how they will be implemented

Five elements of communicating change

Source: The Qualities of Leadership: Leading Change

Leaders of successful change spend considerable time developing a powerful change message, i.e. a compelling narrative that articulates the desired end state, and that makes the change concrete and meaningful to staff.

The organizational change message should:

• Explain why the change is needed.
• Summarize what will stay the same.
• Highlight what will be left behind.
• Emphasize what is being changed.
• Explain how change will be implemented.
• Address how change will affect various roles in the organization.
• Discuss the staff's role in making the change successful.

The Now, Next, Later roadmap

Use this when deadlines and delivery dates are not strict. This is best suited for brainstorming a product plan when dependency mapping is not required.

Now

• What are you going to do now?
• (Very accurate)

Next

• What are you going to do very soon?

Later

• What are you going to do in the future?
• (Vague and aspirational)

Source: Scrum.org, 2017

Now, Next, Later to support product owners

30 minutes

• Leveraging the personal start, stop, continue exercise, attempt to lay out the broad steps you want to take on as a management team to support your product owners.
• Try to lay out in rough priority the items under each category:
  • Now: Let's do this ASAP and get some quick wins.
  • Next: Sometime very soon, let's do these things.
  • Later: Much further off in the distance, let's consider these things.
• For now, just write the items down; you can visualize the Now, Next, Later roadmap later.

Input

• Workshop materials and activities
• Previous slides and activities
• Organizational knowledge

Output

• Now, next, later roadmap

Capture in the Enable Product Delivery – Executive Leadership Workshop Outcomes and Next Steps.

Now, Next, Later to support product owners

30 minutes

Input

• Workshop materials and activities
• Previous slides and activities
• Organizational knowledge

Output

• Now, next, later roadmap

Wrap-Up and Retrospective

• Understanding Your Top Challenges
• Transitioning From Projects to Product-Centric Delivery
• Enterprise Agility and the Value of Change
• Defining Your Products and Product Management
• Connecting Product Management to Agile Practices
• Commit to Empowering Agile Product Teams
• Wrap-Up and Retrospective

A-ha moments!

What will be coming to you

Deliverables will come within one week after the workshop's completion

• Copy of facilitation slides.
• Outcome summary with the results of your workshop, recommendations on where we can make that path easier, links to related research, and your Now, Next, Later roadmap.

Workshop retrospective (Mad, Sad, Glad)

Thank you!

Supporting Research

Transformation topics and supporting Info-Tech research to make the journey easier and with less rework.

Supporting research and services

• Improving IT Alignment
  • Rapidly Develop a Visual IT Strategy
    • Break the cycle of outdated and unread IT strategies.
  • Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy
    • Success depends on IT initiatives clearly aligned to business goals, IT excellence, and driving technology innovation.
    • Includes a "Strategy on a page" template
  • Make Your IT Governance Adaptable
    • Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.
  • Create an IT View of the Service Catalog
    • Unlock the full value of your service catalog with technical components.
  • Application Portfolio Management Foundations
    • Ensure your application portfolio delivers the best possible return on investment.
• Shifting Toward Agile DevOps
  • Agile/DevOps Resource Center
    • Tools and advice you need to be successful with Agile.
  • Develop Your Agile Approach for a Successful Transformation
    • Understand Agile fundamentals, principles, and practices so you can apply them effectively in your organization.
  • Implement DevOps Practices That Work
    • Streamline business value delivery through the strategic adoption of DevOps practices.
  • Perform an Agile Skills Assessment
    • Being Agile isn't about processes, it's about people.
  • Define the Role of Project Management in Agile and Product-Centric Delivery
    • Projects and products are not mutually exclusive.
• Shifting Toward Product Management
  • Make the Case for Product Delivery
    • Align your organization on the practices to deliver what matters most.
  • Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision
    • Build a product vision your organization can take from strategy through execution.
  • Deliver Digital Products at Scale
    • Deliver value at the scale of your organization through defining enterprise product families.
  • Build a Better Product Owner
    • Strengthen the product owner's role in your organization by focusing on core capabilities and proper alignment.
  • Build a Value Measurement Framework
    • Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.
• Improving Value and Delivery Metrics
  • Build a Value Measurement Framework
    • Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.
  • Create a Holistic IT Dashboard
    • Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.
  • Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively
    • Be careful what you ask for because you will probably get it.
  • Reduce Time to Consensus With an Accelerated Business Case
    • Expand on the financial model to give your initiative momentum.
• Improving Governance, Prioritization, and Value
  • Make Your IT Governance Adaptable
    • Governance isn't optional, so keep it simple and make it flexible.
  • Maximize Business Value from IT Through Benefits Realization
    • Embed benefits realization into your governance process to prioritize IT spending and confirm the value of IT.
  • Drive Digital Transformation With Platform Strategies
    • Innovate and transform your business models with digital platforms.
  • Succeed With Digital Strategy Execution
    • Building a digital strategy is only half the battle: create a systematic roadmap of technology initiatives to execute the strategy and drive digital transformation.
  • Build a Value Measurement Framework
    • Focus product delivery on business value-driven outcomes.
  • Create a Holistic IT Dashboard
    • Mature your IT department by measuring what matters.
• Improving Requirements Management and Quality Assurance
  • Requirements Gathering for Small Enterprises
    • Right-size the guidelines of your requirements gathering process.
  • Improve Requirements Gathering
    • Back to basics: great products are built on great requirements.
  • Build a Software Quality Assurance Program
    • Build quality into every step of your SDLC.
  • Automate Testing to Get More Done
    • Drive software delivery throughput and quality confidence by extending your automation test coverage.
  • Manage Your Technical Debt
    • Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.
  • Create a Business Process Management Strategy
    • Avoid project failure by keeping the "B" in BPM.
  • Build a Winning Business Process Automation Playbook
    • Optimize and automate your business processes with a user-centric approach.
  • Create a Winning BPI Playbook
    • Don't waste your time focusing on the "as is." Focus on the improvements and the "to be."
• Improving Release Management
  • Optimize Applications Release Management
    • Build trust by right-sizing your process using appropriate governance.
  • Streamline Application Maintenance
    • Effective maintenance ensures the long-term value of your applications.
  • Streamline Application Management
    • Move beyond maintenance to ensure exceptional value from your apps.
  • Optimize Change Management
    • Right-size your change management process.
  • Manage Your Technical Debt
    • Make the case to manage technical debt in terms of business impact.
  • Improve Application Development Throughput
    • Drive down your delivery time by eliminating development inefficiencies and bottlenecks while maintaining high quality.
• Business Relationship Management
  • Implement Business Relationship Management
    • Leverage knowledge of the business to become a strategic IT partner.
  • Transform IT Into a Value Creator With Business Relationship Management
    • Leverage a deep knowledge of the business to become an innovative and strategic partner.
• Improving Security
  • Build an Information Security Strategy
    • Create value by aligning your strategy to business goals and business risks.
  • Develop and Deploy Security Policies
    • Enhance your overall security posture with a defensible and prescriptive policy suite.
  • Simplify Identity and Access Management
    • Leverage risk- and role-based access control to quantify and simplify the IAM process.
• Improving and Supporting Business-Managed Applications
  • Embrace Business-Managed Applications
    • Empower the business to implement their own applications with a trusted business-IT relationship.
  • Enhance Your Solution Architecture Practices
    • Ensure your software systems solution is architected to reflect stakeholders' short- and long-term needs.
  • Satisfy Digital End Users With Low- and No-Code
    • Extend IT, automation, and digital capabilities to the business with the right tools, good governance, and trusted organizational relationships.
  • Build Your First RPA Bot
    • Support RPA delivery with strong collaboration and management foundations.
  • Automate Work Faster and More Easily With Robotic Process Automation
    • Embrace the symbiotic relationship between the human and digital workforce.
• Improving Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Reporting
  • Modernize Data Architecture for Measurable Business Results
    • Enable the business to achieve operational excellence, client intimacy, and product leadership with an innovative, Agile, and fit-for-purpose data architecture practice.
  • Build a Reporting and Analytics Strategy
    • Deliver actionable business insights by creating a business-aligned reporting and analytics strategy.
  • Build Your Data Quality Program
    • Quality data drives quality business decisions.
  • Design Data-as-a-Service
    • Journey to the data marketplace ecosystems.
  • Build a Robust and Comprehensive Data Strategy
    • Key to building and fostering a data-driven culture.
  • Build an Application Integration Strategy
    • Level the table before assembling the application integration puzzle or risk losing pieces.

Appendix:

Understanding Agile Scrum Practices and Ceremonies

The Agile key principles

Cultural advantages of Agile

Beware of common Agile myths

Basic Scrum process

The Scrum process coordinates multiple stakeholders to deliver on business priorities.

Understand the Scrum process

The scrum process coordinates multiple stakeholders to deliver on business priorities.

Understand the ceremonies part of the scrum process

Scrum vs. Kanban – Key differences

Scrum vs. Kanban – When to use each

Scrum: Delivering related or grouped changes in fixed time intervals.

• Coordinating the development or release of related items
• Maturing a product or service
• Interdependencies between work items

Kanban: Delivering independent items as soon as each is ready.

• Work items from ticketing or individual requests
• Completing independent changes
• Releasing changes as soon as possible

Agile* SDLC

With shared ownership instead of siloes, we are able to deliver value at the end of every iteration (aka sprint)

* There are many Agile methodologies to choose from, but Scrum is by far the most widely used (and is shown above).

Key Elements of the Agile SDLC

• You are not "one-and-done": There are many short iterations with constant feedback.
• There is an empowered product owner: This is a single authoritative voice that represents stakeholders.
• There is a fluid product backlog: This enables prioritization of requirements "just-in-time."
• Cross-functional, self managing team: This team makes commitments and is empowered by the org to do so.
• Working, tested code at the end of each sprint: Value becomes more deterministic along sprint boundaries.
• Demonstrate to stakeholders: Allow them to see and use the functionality and provide necessary feedback.
• Feedback is being continuously injected back into the product backlog: This shapes the future of the solution.
• Continuous improvement through sprint retrospectives.
• "Internally governed" when done right (the virtuous cycle of sprint-demo-feedback).

Scrum roles and responsibilities

Scrum ceremonies

(are any of these challenges for your org?)

Sample delivery sprint calendar: two-week

The following calendar illustrates a two-week scrum cadence (including ceremonies). This diagram is for illustrative purposes only; the length of the sprint and timing of ceremonies may differ from delivery team to delivery team based on their needs and schedules.

Sample delivery sprint calendar: three-week

The following calendar illustrates a three-week scrum cadence (including ceremonies). This diagram is for illustrative purposes only; the length of the sprint and timing of ceremonies may differ from delivery team to delivery team based on their needs and schedules.

Appendix:

Improving Product Management

Product delivery realizes value for your product family

While planning and analysis are done at the family level, work and delivery are done at the individual product level.

Manage and communicate key milestones

Successful product delivery managers understand and define key milestones in their product delivery lifecycles. These need to be managed along with the product backlog and roadmap

Info-Tech Best Practice

Product management isn't just about managing the product backlog and development cycles!

Teams need to manage key milestones such as learning milestones, test releases, product releases, phase gates, and other organizational checkpoints!

Milestones

• Points in the timeline when established sets of artifacts are complete (feature-based), or to check status at a particular point in time (time-based).
• Typically assigned a date and used to show the progress of development.
• Plays an important role when sequencing different types of artifacts.

Release Dates

• Releases mark the actual delivery of a set of artifacts packaged together in a new version of the product.
• Release dates, firm or not, allow stakeholders to anticipate when this is coming.

A backlog stores and organizes PBIs at various stages of readiness

A well-formed backlog can be thought of as a DEEP backlog:

Detailed appropriately: PBIs are broken down and refined as necessary.
Emergent: The backlog grows and evolves over time as PBIs are added and removed.
Estimated: The effort a PBI requires is estimated at each tier.
Prioritized: The PBI's value and priority are determined at each tier.

Backlog tiers facilitate product planning steps

Ranging from the intake of an idea to a PBI ready for development; to enter the backlog, each PBI must pass through a given quality filter.

Each activity is a variation of measuring value and estimating effort in order to validate and prioritize a PBI.

A PBI successfully completes an activity and passes through to the next backlog tier when it meets the appropriate criteria. Quality filters should exist between each tier.

Use quality filters to ensure focus on the most important PBIs

Expand the concepts of defining "ready" and "done" to include the other stages of a PBI's journey through product planning.

Info-Tech Best Practice

A quality filter ensures quality is met and the appropriate teams are armed with the appropriate information to work more efficiently and improve throughput.

Define product value by aligning backlog delivery with roadmap goals

In each product plan, the backlogs show what you will deliver. Roadmaps identify when and in what order you will deliver value, capabilities, and goals.

Product roadmaps guide delivery and communicate your strategy

In Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision, we demonstrate how the product roadmap is core to value realization. The product roadmap is your communicated path, and as a product owner, you use it to align teams and changes to your defined goals, and your product to enterprise goals and strategy.

Adapted from: Pichler, "What Is Product Management?"

Info-Tech Insight

The quality of your product backlog – and your ability to realize business value from your delivery pipeline – is directly related to the input, content, and prioritization of items in your product roadmap.

Info-Tech's approach

Operationally align product delivery to enterprise goals

The Info-Tech difference:

Create a common definition of what a product is and identify products in your inventory.

Use scaling patterns to build operationally aligned product families.

Develop a roadmap strategy to align families and products to enterprise goals and priorities.

Use products and families to evaluate the delivery and organizational design improvements.

What Is a Value Score?

What is a Balanced Score?

Balanced Value is one criteria to guide better decisions

Appendix

How funding changes when applying product thinking

Why is funding so problematic?

We often still think about funding products like construction projects.

"Most IT funding depends on one-time expenditures or capital-funding mechanisms that are based on building-construction funding models predicated on a life expectancy of 20 years or more. Such models don't provide the stability or flexibility needed for modern IT investments."
– EDUCAUSE

These models require increasing accuracy throughout the project lifecycle to manage actuals vs. estimates.

The Lean Enterprise Funding Model is an example of a different approach

From: Implement Agile Practices That Work

Consider how investment spending will differ in an Agile environment

Info-Tech Insight

Traditional budgets place the focus on "cost centers," whereas Agile budgets account for "value streams." The value streams are based around initiatives that may span cost centers.

Your strategy must include the cost to build and operate

Adapted from: "Software Maintenance: Understanding and Estimating Costs"

Most investment happens after go-live, not in the initial build!

Info-Tech Insight

While the exact balance point between development or implementation costs varies from application to application, over 80% of the cost is accrued after go-live.

Traditional accounting leaves software development CapEx on the table

Software development costs have traditionally been capitalized, while research and operations are operational expenditures.

The challenge has always been the myth that operations consist only of bug fixes, upgrades, and other operational expenditures.

Research shows that most post-release work on developed solutions is the development of new features and changes to support material changes in the business.

While projects could bundle some of these changes into capital expenditure, much of the business-as-usual work that goes on leaves capital expenses on the table because the work is lumped together as maintenance-related OpEx.

From: How to Stop Leaving Software CapEx on the Table With Agile and DevOps

Budgeting approaches must evolve as you mature your product operating environment

Info-Tech Insight

As you evolve your approach to product delivery, you will be decoupling the expected benefits, forecast, and budget. Managing them independently will improve your ability to adapt to change and drive the right outcomes!

Appendix:

SDLC transformation steps

Waterfall SDLC – Valuable product delivered at the end of an extended project lifecycle, frequently in years

• Business separated from delivery of technology it needs – only one third of product is actually valuable (ITRG, N=40,000).
• In Waterfall a team of experts in specific disciplines hand off different aspects of the lifecycle.
• Document signoffs are required to ensure integration between silos (Business, Dev, and Ops) and individuals.
• A separate change request process lays over the entire lifecycle to prevent changes from disrupting delivery.
• Tools are deployed to support a specific role (e.g. BA) and seldom integrated (usually requirements <-> test).

Wagile/Agifall/WaterScrumFall SDLC – Valuable product delivered in multiple releases

• Business is more closely integrated by a business product owner accountable for day-to-day delivery of value for users.
• The team collaborates and develops cross-functional skills as they define, design, build, and test code over time.
• Signoffs are reduced but documentation is still focused on satisfying project delivery and operations policy requirements.
• Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
• Tools start to be integrated to streamline delivery (usually requirements and Agile work management tools).

Agile SDLC – Valuable product delivered iteratively: frequency depends Ops' capacity

• Business users are closely integrated through regularly scheduled demos (e.g. every two weeks).
• Team is fully cross-functional and collaboratesto plan, define, design, build, and test the code supported by specialists.
• Documentation is focused on future development and operations needs.
• Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
• Explore automation for application development (e.g. automated regression testing).

Agile with DevOps SDLC – High frequency iterative delivery of valuable product (e.g. every two weeks)

• Business users are closely integrated through regularly scheduled demos.
• Dev and ops teams collaborate to plan, define, design, build, test, and deploy code supported by automation.
• Documentation is focused on supporting users, future changes, and operational support.
• Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
• Build, test, deploy is fully automated (service desk is still separated).

DevOps SDLC – Continuous integration and delivery

• Business users are closely integrated through regularly scheduled demos.
• Fully integrated DevOps team collaborates to plan, define, design, build, test, deploy, and maintain code.
• Documentation Is focused on future development and use adoption.
• Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
• Fully integrated development and operations toolchain.

Fully integrated product SDLC – Agile + DevOps + continuous delivery of valuable product on demand

• Business users are fully integrated with the teams through dedicated business product owner.
• Cross-functional teams collaborate across the business and technical life of the product.
• Documentation supports internal and external needs (business, users, Ops).
• Change is built into the process to allow the team to respond to change dynamically.
• Fully integrated toolchain (including service desk).

Appendix:

About Info-Tech

It Just Makes Sense to...
Leverage Best Practices

• Best practices being shared by 35,000
• members that you can leverage
• Millions spent developing tools and templates annually
• Direct access to over 100 analysts you can leverage as an extension of your team
• Massive data-base of benchmarks and vendor assessments
• Get up to speed in a fraction of the time

Avoid starting from scratch

Systematically Improve
IT Performance

Follow our standardized path to drive IT maturity & effectiveness for your department. Each leader on your team will work with a dedicated Info-Tech Executive Advisor to create customized annual roadmaps to address their specific challenges and opportunities. Whether your IT department is an Unstable Operator, an Innovative Champion, or any stage in between, Info-Tech has the proven knowledge, skills, and years of practical IT management and advisory experience to help stabilize and optimize your IT operations.

Each Executive on Your Team Receives:

• A dedicated Executive Advisor to help diagnose and drive improvement within your organization.
• A customized Key Initiative Plan around your top priorities and a clear roadmap of how to improve their IT function.
• On-demand advisory support for all of your key projects.
• Complete online access to tools and best-practice resources.

Info-Tech Research Group Maturity Model

A Step by Step
Program to Systematically
Improve IT Performance

Info-Tech provides best-practice research,

making your job easier.

• Tools & templates
• Step-by-step methodologies, benchmarking, diagnostic programs, training and executive coaching, insights, and advice from 20,000+ peers

01 MANAGE AND IMPROVE

• Core IT Processes

02 FASTER AND MORE EFFECTIVELY COMPLETE YOUR

• Technology Projects

03 TRAIN AND DEVELOP YOUR

• IT Leadership Team

04 BUILD A DATA-DRIVEN

• IT Strategy

05 A STEP-BY-STEP PROGRAM TO

• Systematically Improve IT

Info-Tech Research Group
Performance Difference

For over 20 years, Info-Tech has provided IT teams with practical advice that helps make measurable improvement.

Since launching our systematic program to improve IT performance in 2013, Info-Tech members have dramatically outperformed their peers by delivering superior levels of business satisfaction.