Are you frustrated with lengthy and inconclusive backlog refinement sessions? This workshop provides techniques to improve the speed and effectiveness of portfolio, program and team level backlog refinement.
For Program Managers & Agile Managers:
Want visibility and steering at the Portfolio, Program, and Team levels? In my experience with clients at scale, sending different people to Portfolio, Program, and Team-level planning causes a disconnect: poor estimation and poor technical runway. The argument has been that if we have developers on every Portfolio/Program-level discussion they'll never have any time to write code. Speed Grooming offers an alternative--invite the teams to talk about the future, but limit the discussion time. Learn how this applies at all levels so you can close the loop between Portfolio, Program, & Team planning. André Dhondt shares stories of real-world agile teams using this technique and how they've moved to a customer-empathy mindset.
For Delivery Team Members:
Want your sprint/iteration planning to take less than fifteen minutes (excluding tasking)? Want stories that are sufficiently well understood that we can actually finish everything we committed to? The key is in the way we decouple whole-team and individual homework during backlog grooming. How does it work? You need to develop great stories—customer-focused, just barely enough detail, in thin vertical slices, and collectively designed. André reviews story writing and describes how to do the three phases of grooming in under one team-hour a week (typically, two 25-minute meetings) by defining the phases—Exploring, Sizing, and Splitting, plus one off-line activity called Persona Mapping. Learn to avoid the overhead of long pre-backlog sessions, reduce Product Owner prep time, and prevent hidden dependencies from bumping a story out to the next iteration.
