Focus on Rate of Delivery
Delivering new and improved features and services to our customers is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage. If we deliver too slowly, customers will use competitive products that have more and better features. If we deliver too quickly, the quality of our features and services will decline and Quality of Service will suffer.
In A Nutshell
We inspect the sequencing and rate of delivery of new features and services to our customers, ensuring the additional value created for customers aligns with their expectations. We use measures of productivity to assess rate of delivery. We use measures of expected and realised value to assess delivered value.
We work as a team to identify how we can ensure that the rate of delivery remains sustainable. We work as a team to find ways to improve our rate of delivery in a sustainable way. Improvement can change process, practice, technology, skills and capacity in any combination. We draw on the ideas that underpin the theory of constraints to help us prioritise our improvements.
Practices
We review the flow of work through our system, paying attention to the overall rate of flow and to bottlenecks as work flows through our process. Where bottlenecks are identified we seek to understand the root causes of each bottleneck. With this understanding we relieve the constraints by experimenting with changes to our process. Where we see examples of accelerated flow, we look for practices facilitating this acceleration. We experiment to find ways to incorporate these practices into our process.
The team uses measures of delivery in order to understand its current rate of delivery. After data has been gathered for some time, trend analysis may reveal how rate of delivery is changing over time. The rate of delivery and its trend help the team to understand whether and where they need to focus their attention in order to meet their own and stakeholders expectations.
Sprint Planning is a Scrum event that is held before the start of the sprint to establish the scope and priorities of the coming sprint. Its purpose is for the whole team to establish an agreed sprint goal based on the Product Owner’s view of the value that can be created for the customer. To establish a scope of backlog items that can be got to done. For each backlog item the team decides how done will be achieved.
The Sprint Retrospective is a Scrum event. Its purpose is to allow the team to inspect and adapt its way of working, the functioning of the team, the working context and all other factors which may impact the team’s ability to deliver its goals. Some factors the team have direct control over, other factors will require external influence to change.
Stop the Line is a practice in Kanban. Whenever a defect is detected downstream of the point where it should have been eliminated, the line is stopped. The team take time to identify and explore the reasons for the escape of the defect. They decide what action to take to prevent defects of the same type escaping in the future. Best practice also uses Stop the Line to identify and reinforce modified practice that brings performance benefits to the work of the team.
The Product Roadmap provides a simple view of how the product will grow towards its vision. As a forward looking view, the roadmap does not set fixed priorities or deadlines. Rather it is a fluid view that evolves as our understanding of customers’ needs evolves. Roadmaps are influenced by concerns in addition to the customers’ needs. These may include our capability and capacity to deliver change and the business, financial and legal context in which our product operates.
The Product Backlog is the vehicle by which needs are turned into requirements and requirements are turned into operational features in our product. It is a prioritised list of the work that the team currently intends to deliver in the next period of time. The less imminent a feature is, the less well it will be defined.