Agile in Name, Waterfall in Practice
Agile in Name, Waterfall in Practice
An organization can decide to adopt a framework overnight. It cannot decide to change how it actually thinks about building software. The gap between the two gets paid, quietly and personally, by whoever is standing in the middle.
Why Transformations Stall
At some point a leadership team decides the organization is "going agile": adopting a scaled framework, standing up trains, running planning events, renaming the roles. The decision is real, the in...
The Living Backlog: Making Your Artifacts Something Stakeholders Actually Open
The Living Backlog: Making Your Artifacts Something Stakeholders Actually Open
Most transformation artifacts are produced, filed, and never opened again. All the rigor underneath them: the traceability, the prioritization, the structure is wasted the moment no one will navigate it. A living backlog is the opposite: a current, navigable view of the work that stakeholders open on their own, because it answers their question in seconds.
There is a particular kind of waste that transformation...
Standing Up a Portfolio From Nothing
Standing Up a Portfolio From Nothing
Plenty of organizations have a great deal of activity and no portfolio, no coherent layer that says what initiatives exist, how they connect, who owns them, what's at risk, and when they land. Assembling that layer where none existed is quiet, unglamorous work, and it is what turns scattered motion into something an organization can actually steer.
Walk into a large program mid-flight and you will usually find no shortage of work. Teams are busy, initia...
The Runway Problem: Why You Can’t Prioritize a Backlog You Can’t Yet Build
A backlog tells you what the business wants. It says nothing about what can actually be built next, or what has to exist first. That missing information, the architectural runway, is why "what should we invest in?" so often has no honest answer, and why teams end up fed by hand.
You can produce a beautifully structured backlog with epics, features, user stories, all prioritized by business value, and still be unable to answer the one question leadership actually asks: what should we invest in...
Mapping Both Value Streams as One Picture
Two value streams run underneath every transformation: how the business delivers value to customers, and how the organization builds the systems that make that possible. They are almost always mapped separately, by different people, in different languages, which is exactly why the business and the technology drift apart. Putting both on one picture is the artifact that keeps them aligned.
Ask the business how it works and you get a story about process: how an order becomes a delivery, how a c...
WSJF Without the Theater (Score Your Backlog, Free)
Weighted Shortest Job First is a genuinely good way to prioritize, and one of the easiest to turn into theater. The arithmetic is the trivial part. The honesty of the inputs is the whole game, and it is exactly the part organizations skip.
Prioritization is where most programs quietly go to war. Everyone's feature is the most important; every deadline is the hardest; every team believes its work should be first. Into that fight walks Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) with a promise that soun...
Epics as Hypotheses, Not Projects, and the Review That Makes It Real
Framing a big initiative as a hypothesis instead of a project is a genuine advance. But a hypothesis is a contract that requires a counterparty: someone to read the evidence and decide. Write rigorous hypotheses into an organization with no review gate, and you have produced the paperwork of agility with the behaviour of waterfall.
There is a real and valuable shift in how mature organizations frame large investments. Instead of defining a big initiative as a project, "we will build X, by dat...
The Traceability Chain: From Interview to User Story Without a Broken Link
Most backlogs cannot answer the two questions that matter most: why does this item exist, and if the business need behind it changes, what do we have to rebuild? A traceability chain answers both.
Pick any story in a large product backlog and ask the team a simple question: why does this exist? In most organizations the honest answer is a shrug, or a name: "someone asked for it," "it came out of a workshop," "it's been in there since the last planning cycle." The provenance is gone. The item ...
The Prototype Is the Requirement: Why Interviews Alone Stopped Being Enough
The old model asked people what they wanted and wrote it down. The new one shows them something and watches what they do. The difference is the difference between stated needs and real ones.
For most of the history of enterprise software, gathering requirements meant the same sequence of moves. An analyst or product owner interviewed stakeholders, ran workshops, and asked people what they needed. The answers were captured in a document, a requirements specification, a set of user stories, a ...
The Business–Digital Divide: How Transformations Lose the People They’re Meant to Help
The ceremonies of a scaling framework are a trust-manufacturing machine. Run them as theater, and they manufacture only the appearance of trust while the real thing drains away.
The most quietly devastating moment in a transformation program is rarely about budget or architecture or scope. It is a senior business leader concluding, without drama, that engaging with the transformation is no longer a good use of their time, and simply stopping. Not being difficult. Being honest. Deciding to re-...