In the world of SAFe, a Dev team should have a unified foundation of work to ensure ease of application for all code that is written. The smaller a story is, the faster it gets put into development, and production, and we catch bugs sooner and more efficiently. However, there are tools and methodologies we can use, to help us mitigate these errors ...

​In 2015 my father introduced me to the concept of a "Scrum Master". "What the heck is that?" I thought. This was a job that I had never heard of, and quite honestly, it sounded boring. My interest in it was mitigated for those reasons, and the fact that I was confident I wouldn't be able to get the hang of the job. He tried to show me how straight...

You must be logged in to download this PPTX file. On Sept 25, I gave the below talk to the Houston Agile Leadership Network. Please feel free to download it and use it according the Creative Commons license it is released under.

Introduction In the world of SAFe, there is no perfect, secret recipe, for making sure your PI Planning session runs perfectly; we are all merely human, and couldn't possibly predict every outcome with 100% accuracy. However, what we CAN do is make sure that we set up our teams for success to the absolute best of our ability. As it so happens there...

In all organizations of any size there is a need to manage the work of the organization and guide the efforts of the people involved in the work. Traditionally, in larger organizations, this guidance was organized under the title of Project Management Office, or PMO. The PMO usually consisted of senior project managers, along with some represe...

Disclaimer I am a lot of things, but an introvert is NOT one of them. In fact, I am full-blown extrovert. In the movie Shrek, when Princess Fiona finds out that Donkey can talk, Shrek sarcastically responds, "Yeah, but it's getting him to shut up that's the trick." Yeah, that's me sometimes. So, why am I, an admitted extro, writing a...

Introduction  Thanks for sticking with us through this three part series on SAFe backlogs! We've finally arrived at the final portion, where we'll be talking about the actual work items themselves. To date we've gotten a good look at the "lay of the land" and seen where all of the SAFe backlogs exist, as well as taken a deeper look at how they...

The Hierarchy  This section may seem like its coming out of order; shouldn't we cover the specifics of each work item before we talk about their organizational structure? Maybe, but I'm coming at the topic in this sequence because I believe that where these work items sit in the Big Picture is such a huge part of understanding what they are. W...

​When I am working with a client who is new to the Scaled Agile framework, or I'm delivering a training course for soon-to-be agilists, there's always a large number of questions about how the SAFe backlogs and work items relate to each other. These questions are understandable when you look over the Big Picture and see all of the different element...