Executing on our Roadmap… Sharing our Agile Themes
(Scott Gilbert, guest blogger)
Back in December, I wrote a post titled “We Roadmap and So Should You”. I talked about how Enthiosys uses a variant of our product roadmapping techniques to organize and coordinate the execution of our key processes, programs and projects. As any good Agile planning team would, we have a set of annual company goals, a driving theme for the year as well as quarterly goals and themes. Our execution plan includes weekly stand-ups and deep dives into quarterly goals, each of which are “owned” by a team member, although we are all accountable for our shared success. At the end of each month, we run the key metrics (read as velocity) to see how we are doing, and do deep-dive retrospectives quarterly to identify process improvement opportunities.
Well, Q1 was pretty good. Some execution and process improvement opportunities were identified and we are starting to do a few things differently… even though we’re a bunch of old dogs and APMM veterans.
Living so closely to our quarterly cycle, though, I realized that you may not have context for how our outward communications fit into the larger APM story we’re telling throughout year – even if you are paying attention to what we write (Bytes, Blogs, etc.) and say (Webinars and Conferences, etc.).
So here it is in summary. Our annual theme is “Achieving Business Agility through Agile Product Management”. The quarterly themes include:
- Q1: Cross-Functional Organizations to Enable Business Agility (Agile Restauranteurs, Adding Outbound to Cross-Functional Teams, Business Agility and the Soviets)
- Q2: Capturing All the Value; Making or Saving Money
- Q3: Deliver on Market Needs with the Right Products, Services & Support
- Q4: Turning the Ship through Continuous, Data-Driven Re-Planning
Now that the cat is out of the bag, you can look back out our earlier stuff to see what we’ve said. And you know what to expect from us in the next few quarters. This is our commitment to you and it’s on our roadmap, so please keep us honest. This quarter, we have a goal to publish our next white paper with a point of view on what it takes to achieve Business Agility. I hope you stay tuned as we tell more of this story.
