Conclusion

Job drivers

Categories of job drivers

• Attitudes - personality traits that affect behavior and decision-making (e.g. social pressure, corporate culture, personality, expectations of others)
• Background - long-term context that affects behavior and decision-making (e.g. geographic/cultural dynamics)
• Circumstances - immediate or near-term factors that affect behavior and decision-making (e.g. environmental factors, work schedule, unexpected events)

Prioritize feature backlog

• Attitudes
  • Without a clear priority of work, programs and teams will feel everything needs to be done now
  • Some product managers feel that if they set a priority for their feature backlog, that means that things at the bottom won’t get done
• Background
  • Many programs may have created features and epics, but will not have refined them enough to be appropriately prioritized
  • Sometimes there are different prioritization techniques across the organization, which can make prioritization more difficult
  • Features on the roadmap might not be connected to the parent epics, which leads to a disconnected view of work and priority
• Circumstances
  • Unexpected features can emerge after initial prioritization, which results in a new prioritization of work
  • Priorities shift as the market/customer needs shift, which could also result in a new prioritization of work

Update program capacity

• Attitudes
  • Some program leaders feel that capacity doesn’t change from one planning period to another, which is normally not the case since many factors impact capacity
• Background
  • Sometimes organizations have inconsistent planning periods, which can make it difficult to understand how much capacity a program has for an upcoming planning period
• Circumstances
  • Programs need to look at changes to team and program structure heading into the next planning period to properly forecast their capacity, accounting for things like the merging/splitting of teams, adding of teams, adding of people, etc.

Balance demand vs. capacity

• Attitudes
  • Sometimes program leaders will over-forecast work due to high demand because the feel they have to accomplish all the work in the backlog (this is not necessarily the case)
• Background
  • Organizations coming from traditional, project-based environments tend to overcommit demand (the backlog of work), or not balance (and rebalance over time) demand against capacity
  • When demand exceeds capacity, organizations should examine what is being requested to see what work is truly needed to accomplish the objectives being pursued
• Circumstances
  • Programs need to examine and balance demand and capacity regularly (more than just once a planning period), which will help manage stakeholder expectations

References

• Roadmaps overview

Congratulations!