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)

Assess delivered value

• Attitudes
  • Program leadership may feel they are measuring value, but instead may be measuring proxies for value (e.g. throughput)
• Background
  • Sometimes product managers will describe the “what” or “how” of a feature, but not the “why” or “benefit”
  • Sometimes programs have features with a benefit hypothesis and/or acceptance criteria that are not testable and measurable
  • Sometimes objectives are not measurable, meaning that the assessment of value can only be quantitative/best guess (e.g. planned vs delivered value)
• Circumstances
  • Establish a definition of done (DoD) so that all features and stories meet minimum requirements to be reviewed/assessed by stakeholders
  • Having stakeholder/customer representatives assess the value of delivered work is better than not having any value assessed if customers and stakeholders themselves are unavailable

Review customer needs

• Attitudes
  • Customers can sometimes feel like their needs are not being heard/understood when new functionality is delivered that does not accomplish what they need
• Background
  • In many organizations, customers and stakeholders are removed from the delivery of work, only finding out about new functionality when things like release notes are distributed
• Circumstances
  • When customers and stakeholders are not available to provide feedback on upcoming work, find proxies who can speak on behalf of the customer/stakeholder

Revisit feature estimates

• Attitudes
  • Sometimes program leaders feel that estimates that were wrong and need to be updated to reflect reality
  • Sometimes program leaders feel uncomfortable revising estimates because they have been held to estimates in the past
• Background
  • Some programs will look at historic estimates to help inform and revise estimates on future work, while more traditional organizations are not allowed to change estimates because they are considered committed values
• Circumstances
  • When the estimate on a delivered work item is considered to be incorrect (e.g. significantly more or less work than expected), instead of revising the historic estimate, the program should learn what aspects of the work impacted the estimate and account for it in future estimates

References

• PI Objectives - Scaled Agile Framework
• Built-In Quality - Scaled Agile Framework
• System Demo - Scaled Agile Framework
• Advanced Topic - Innovation Accounting in SAFe - Scaled Agile Framework

Congratulations!