project planning

If you are managing your portfolio using projects, and not products, you may be missing opportunities to deliver more business value to your organization. Product and portfolio roadmaps are a strategic tool that you can use to align business goals and value to product delivery plans. Ellen Gottesdiener explores the why's, what's, and how's of product roadmaps including the different types of product roadmaps, steps for building and sustaining product roadmaps, key planning inputs, who should be involved, and techniques for exploring and evaluating features along the roadmap. Roadmaps articulate how your products will achieve their vision, help uncover technology requirements, communicate to internal and external customers, and provide a sound foundation for planning. Learn how roadmaps can help you deliver the right products, address customer needs, and make tough choices that will deliver strategic value.

What do poker, Greek oracles, an Italian mathematician from the Middle Ages, and the path of hurricanes have in common? Given the title of this presentation, chances are it has something to do with estimation, and you'll have to attend this session to get the full connection. Kent McDonald explores the challenges and realities of trying to estimate software-related knowledge work-analysis, testing, development, and the entire project effort. A major challenge is that there are no guaranteed ways to arrive at perfectly accurate estimates, which not surprisingly is why they are called estimates. Kent introduces and gives you a chance to practice quick and practical estimating techniques that will work in different situations-guesstimating, break it down and add it up, and planning poker.

Picture this scene from three years ago: Employing the corporately mandated processes, a software engineering team is delivering system updates about once every nine months. When their senior user suddenly demands the next delivery in twenty-two weeks-half the current cycle duration-the team realize that they must quickly change development practices. Mathew Bissett describes how Her Majesty's Government did precisely that-and much, much more. First, they reduced delivery cycles from unpredictable dates every nine months to predictable releases every six weeks. Then, they cut releases cycle time to once every week. By identifying and mitigating risks early in the work intake process, enforcing quality gates, executing multiple test levels concurrently-and more-they dramatically increased throughput with the same or better quality. Today, these new processes provide their teams the best balance of structure versus agility.