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📘 Horizon Planning in Agile PgM Horizon Planning in Agile Programme Management is a way of planning at different levels of detail over time, accepting uncertainty and enabling change—while still maintaining control and alignment to the programme vision. In simple terms: > Plan in detail only what is near, and keep the future flexible. --- 🔭 The Three Horizons (most commonly used) Horizon 1 – Near Term (Detailed Planning) Covers short-term delivery High level of certainty Capabilities to be enabled soon Detailed planning is appropriate Projects and tranches are clearly defined 👉 “Only those capabilities to be enabled in the short term can be planned in detail.” --- Horizon 2 – Medium Term (Outline Planning) Covers upcoming capabilities Moderate uncertainty Planned at high level Priorities may change based on: Early benefits realised Lessons learned Changes in business strategy 👉 Focus is on options, sequencing, and dependencies, not detail. --- Horizon 3 – Long Term (Vision-Level...

In Agile product development, success often depends on how well teams lay the groundwork before the first sprint begins. This crucial preparation phase is commonly known as Sprint 0 . It sets the foundation for effective collaboration, smooth execution, and long-term project success. Sprint 0 is not about delivering features but about setting up the environment, processes, and alignment required to ensure the team can move fast and deliver value from Sprint 1 onward. The process can be broken down into six essential steps: 1. Project Initiation The journey begins with clarifying the vision of the project, assembling the right team , and defining goals . This ensures everyone understands the purpose and direction before diving into execution. A shared vision aligns stakeholders and provides the team with a north star for decision-making. Unlike regular sprints, Sprint 0 is short and focused. Its duration typically ranges from 1 to 2 weeks , depending on project size, complexity, and...

Agile Product Management: Agile product management is a product development approach that involves teams working in short sprints to frequently iterate and adapt the roadmap. The product strategy and vision are defined at the start, but they remain flexible to what the team learns along the way.  Some common agile frameworks for product development include:  Scrum Kanban Extreme Programming (XP) Product management is the intersection of business, user experience, and technology. 4 Agile values followed in Agile product management: Best practices followed in Agile Product Management: Set product strategy Understand customer needs Create the product roadmap Prioritize features Release customer experiences (frequent release) Measure product success

 Option 1: Total number of employees working in 2 week sprint for small size team = 8 Defect fixing effort = no of persons*working hours per day*defects fixed per hour=8*8*2 = 128 Assume we received 100 defects  Rework effort  = total defects/defect fixing effort=100/128 = 0.78 days per person. Option 2: Rework (%) = (total number of rework effort per sprint  ÷ total number of effort per sprint) × 100% total number of rework effort per sprint = 64 hours  total number of effort per sprint = no of person * working hours per day * number of spirt days  total number of effort per sprint = 8 * 8 * 10 = 640 hours Rework (%) = (64  ÷ 640) × 100%  = 10 %

Even-though scrum master and product owner work closely together their roles and responsibility are different. Mostly product owner from buying organization and scrum master from selling organization. A scrum master leads the development team  and seeks input from product owner to get user stories  prioritised  and update status to product owner. As you aware product backlog is crucial for the agile project development. It contains all the user stories needs to be delivered during the project. Product owner need to ensure the product backlog is available to the scrum master and it contains the needs of customer, business, sales, marketing team and all other relevant stakeholders. Once the product owner create the vision for the project, it’s scrum master’s responsibility to bring the vision to live. Scrum masters are responsible for adopting and implementing agile methods to increase team productivity, efficiency, and improve the quality of the deliverables they have been...

Lean agile aims to eliminate wasteful resources and tasks for improved efficiency and reduced costs, while never sacrificing quality. In fact, lean agile prioritizes bringing value to the customer with every decision that's made. Lean agile is a development method that helps teams identify waste and refine processes. The way of eliminating wastes are: The figure of the Product Owner represents a clever way to speed up the flow of information between the customer and the developers. This reduces the risk of rework that so often appears in non-scrum development projects.  Lean teaches us that each leader ( Scrum Maser ) must be in constant contact with his team and know each member well enough to understand the problems they encounter each day. This enables flow and therefore customer satisfaction. Having cross-functional teams , lean tells us, allows for a quick flow of information, because waiting for the contribution of a team member from another function doesn’t happen. In le...

Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is observed. Pillars of  Empiricism . Various practices exist to forecast progress, like burn-downs, burn-ups, or cumulative flows. While proven useful, these do not replace the importance of empiricism . In complex environments, what will happen is unknown. Only what has already happened may be used for forward-looking decision making. Each artifact contains a commitment to ensure it provides information that enhances transparency and focus against which progress can be measured: ● For the Product Backlog it is the Product Goal. ● For the Sprint Backlog it is the Sprint Goal. ● For the Increment it is the Definition of Done. These commitments exist to reinforce empiricism . The sum of the Increments is presented at the Sprint Review thus supporting empiricism .

Challenge 1:   Team members are not adapted to Scrum to make estimate. At the grooming session involve with team and work along with them to convert epic in user story and break user story into task. Use Planning Poker or T-Shirt Size estimation technique to create estimate and involve them. So they see what the solution could be and how many effort it needs. Challenge 2:   The user stories are too big and not detailed enough. Release planning is the time entire scrum team work with product owner to discuss on the Epic to create user stories. Need to perform backlog grooming with Product Owner and Business Analyst during the sprint planning meeting to break user stories into small and doable. Challenge 3:   Almost all user stories are in progress till the last day of sprint. The first thump rule is the user stories with in the sprints should not depend on each other. Break user stories in to tasks which should be doable in a day. If you are using two week sprint foll...

 MVP patterns that can serve as early milestones for your product. 1) Promotional MVP 2) Mining MVP 3) Landing Page 4) Single feature MVP 5) Wizard of Oz MVP

Steve Blank said You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries, not everyone. The MVP is called minimum, as you should spend as little time and effort to create it as possible.  But this does not mean that it has to be quick and dirty.  But try to keep it as small as possible to accelerate learning and avoid the possibility of wasting time and money, as your idea may turn out to be wrong! You need to validate 2 kinds of hypotheses before you start MVP. 1) Technical Are you capable from technical point of view? if not there is no product. 2) Market Is market ready to accept an buy the product?  if not there is no product. Above 2 hypotheses should be validated in your Product Backlog. Few inspiring MVP are: Amazon (launched Amazon B2C, Prime, alexa, echo, etc..)  Dropbox (Starting out as a demo video MVP, Dropbox explained the benefits of storing data in one place. The feedback from users helped the then-startup receive the funds.) Fa...

 We will mentor and motivate development team in Agile way: There are 5 core agile principles are: 1) Commitment: Let the team commit to delivering the work in a sprint 2) Focus: We will track the tasks we perform that don't directly contribute to our deliverables and we will work to minimize them. 3) Openness: Learn to say "NO" to taking more work and finally fail to deliver 5) Respect: We will show up for all meetings on time and be prepared to present and participate. There are 4 additional values are: Humility, Truth, Honesty and Simplicity: Everyone involved with your project has equal value and therefore should be treated with respect.  Trusting each other involves lot more than mere interaction and collaboration It needs individuals to be honest, open-minded, truthful and ready to listen to the others' perspectives. Dalai Lama Said: “If you are honest, truthful, and transparent, people trust you. If people trust you, you have no grounds for fear, suspicion or ...