Agile Pain Point Solutions (APPS) Series is collection of 1-day classes that cut straight to the challenges people have been reporting to us for over a decade. Offering simple, yet powerful answers, each class gives you new skills and insights with which to address an aspect of Agile adoption that is poorly addressed in conventional literature.

Managing Large Backlogs

Scheduling, Sequencing & Selection Using Risk Assessment Frameworks and Cost of Delay Analysis

Learn to prioritize better and faster. Make better, fact-based, more defensible decisions.

If you search for a flight on a travel web site and the results state that 3000+ flights met your criteria, how do you choose which one to buy? You don’t rank or prioritize a large set of choices, instead you filter them. When you have to answer questions like, “What should we start next?” – “Which order must we do things?” – “How many things should we have in progress at the same time?” and “What might be the impact if an item takes longer and is delivered later than we hoped?” …traditional approaches to these questions, are cumbersome, time-consuming and often require large amounts of guessing and use of assumptions, layered upon more assumptions.

This class teaches you a fast, light-weight and yet very powerful approach to deciding what do to next, which order to do things, when to start something and how to manage a very large set of choices, using fact-based, filtering techniques similar to those seen on travel booking web sites. The use of fact-based risk assessment, risk assessment frameworks, demand-shaping thresholds, and qualitative understanding of cost of delay, will enable faster, better decision making, for scheduling, sequencing and selection of work. If you’ve found yourself, questioning your actions and judgment, in denial of guessing and manipulating your equations in order to get to the right answer, if you’ve often felt like an imposter in your role as a product manager or product owner, if “prioritization” is your job, then this class will provide answers to questions that have been frustrating you for years. Using these techniques, you’ll gain confidence, you’ll make better, more defensible decisions, and you will gain mastery of your responsibilities. Risk assessment is THE essential skill for product owners and this intensive 1-day class will teach you how to use it.

Who Should Attend?

This class is for anyone who does “prioritization” for a living: product managers; product owners, service request managers, marketing directors, and executives who set strategy and manage portfolios and programs. It is appropriate for anyone performing the following functions: strategic planning; product management; product design; service implementation/dispatching; product ownership; and portfolio management. This class is useful for anyone who finds current techniques are often time-consuming and speculative, where consensus is hard to achieve, and decisions are often difficult to defend when challenged. If you spend days on prioritization and selection of new work, and often the meetings are intense, stressful, and frustrating then this risk assessment technique will cut right through these problems. Exponents of the method often report that prioritization meetings with many stakeholders can be resolved in 20-30 minutes with strong consensus.
 

Prerequisites:

There are no specific prerequisites for this class. It is recommended that attendees have a business background or a role in marketing, strategic planning or portfolio management. A business degree or formal qualification in business is not necessary but attendees with such a background may find the contrasts with familiar material to be either interest or challenging. Prior knowledge of Kanban may also enhance the learning experience but is certainly not required.

Kanban University® Certification: 

Students will receive a certificate of completion recognizing participation in the class.