Agile Product and Project Management: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building the Right Products Right

289 Pages·2022·6.059 MB·English

by  Mariya Breyter

AGILE PRODUCT AND
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO BUILDING
THE RIGHT PRODUCTS RIGHT
Mariya Breyter
Agile Product and Project Management: A Step-by-Step Guide to
Building the Right Products Right
Mariya Breyter
New York, NY, USA
ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-8199-4 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-8200-7
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-8200-7
Copyright © 2022 by Mariya Breyter
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Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
About the Author v
About the Technical Reviewer vii
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
Part I: Building the Right IT Product 1
Chapter 1: The Role of Project and Product Management
in Software Delivery and IT Services 3
Chapter 2: Starting with Why 23
Chapter 3: Getting to Know Your Customer 43
Chapter 4: Validating the Product Hypothesis 69
Chapter 5: Creating and Maintaining IT Requirements 95
Part II: Building the Product RIGHT 125
Chapter 6: Waterfall, Agile, and Hybrid Delivery Frameworks 127
Chapter 7: Agile Estimation and Planning 161
Chapter 8: Incremental Delivery and Continuous Improvement 187
Chapter 9: Agile Implementation Beyond IT: Budget
Management, Risk Management, and Procurement
Management in Agile 207
Chapter 10: Scaling Agile Delivery 235
Chapter 11: Final Project, Agile Career Progression, and
Interview Tips 263
Conclusion 285
Appendix A: Homework 287
Appendix B: Self-Review Quizzes 295
Appendix C: V ideos, Books, and Online Sources for
In-Depth Learning 319
Glossary 333
Index 343
About the Author
Dr. Mariya Breyter is an educator and a practitioner who brings 20 years
of leadership experience to the Agile and Lean community. Her passion for
managing complex business initiatives and delivering superior products to cli-
ents through efficient Agile, and Lean processes has produced success after
success in companies ranging from Big 4 consulting and Fortune 100 technol-
ogy, insurance, and financial services firms to startups.
Dr. Breyter has a PhD in computational linguistics from Moscow State
University followed by a postdoctorate scholarship at Stanford University. She
has built her career optimizing and improving software delivery and instilling
Agile and Lean values at multitudes of companies while keeping the primary
focus on the people within those processes. The list of her certifications
includes CSP, SPC, CSM, PMP, PMI-ACP, ITIL 3.0, Agile Facilitation, and Agile
Coaching from ACI. She teaches Agile Project Management and other related
courses at New York University.
Dr. Breyter is an Agile project management thought leader and an estab-
lished speaker at Agile conferences, from the keynote at Product World and
a presentation at Lean IT conference in Paris to the Agile Conference in San
Diego, CA, and a popular blogger. Her article was included in the Best Agile
Articles publication. Dr. Breyter’s free educational and coaching websites
are popular among the Agile and Lean communities. Dr. Breyter is passion-
ate about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is a mentor and presenter at
the Grace Hopper conference and a co-organizer of the Women in Agile
chapter.
About the Technical
Reviewer
Moshe Rasis has extensive experience in business and technology leader-
ship, with interest in talent development, coaching, mentoring, and teaching.
He has held senior leadership roles with multiple large corporations including
Merck, Dun & Bradstreet, the Washington Post, the Federal Reserve Bank,
and Dentsu Aegis Network. Primary industries he has worked with include
healthcare, financial services, and media. He has expertise in PMO-related
disciplines (e.g., PMO leadership, Portfolio/Program/Project delivery, Agile,
and traditional methodologies), process and performance improvement
frameworks including Six Sigma, and management consulting. He is a lecturer
and speaker at national conferences.
Moshe has an MBA from Case Western Reserve University (Operations
Management and Information Systems) and a Six Sigma certification; he is a
Certified Organizational Coach from New York University, member of ICF
(International Coach Federation), Project Management Professional (PMP),
and an Agile/SAFe practitioner.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank many thought leaders and supportive friends and colleagues
who encouraged me and shared their feedback on the book: Johanna Rothman,
my mentor and the author of many groundbreaking books on Agile project
management and product delivery; Moshe Rasis, a program management
leader and executive coach; Dana Pylayeva, an Agile and Leadership coach;
Leila Rao, a Business Agility and Diversity expert; Steven Pae, an NYU
Professor and Technology Leader; Andrey Bykov, a product management
practitioner who exemplifies customer obsession; my NYU mentors,
Professors Edward Kleinert and Larry Mantrone, my NYU students in Agile
project management and IT Management Principles; and many other Agile and
Lean professionals and colleagues who shaped my experience and extended
my horizons. I am grateful to my editor Susan McDermott and to my longtime
friend and colleague, and the author of an inspirational book on high-perfor-
mance teams Alberto Silveira who made this introduction. And most impor-
tantly, I am grateful to my husband, Greg, and our sons, Max and Anthony,
who tolerated my hours of writing and inspired me throughout my personal
and professional journey – without all of you, this book would not be possible.
Preface
The goal of this book is to share my real-life experience in leading and supporting
Agile transformations – from both a product and a project perspective. While it was
written with my graduate-level course in Agile project management in mind and is
well suited as a textbook, I can see the audience as anyone involved in delivering
products that delight customers. These products may range from software products
in any industry to any deliverable that accomplishes its purpose in sales, marketing,
recruiting, service industry – virtually anywhere. Understanding how Agile works in
practice is equally important for a student entering the workforce and for an expe-
rienced IT, marketing, sales – you name it! – professional who wants to make a
difference and build the right products right for their customers.
This idea originated as a means to fill the void in higher education. With over 20
years of industry experience, I was able to evidence multiple examples of how higher
education is disconnected from the actual experience of building software products
or delivering services. In many instances, students complete their education with
advanced technical knowledge and yet without a clear understanding that they are
building products for their customers – whether it is a human capital management
system for internal customers within their company, data center migration to the
cloud to support company’s product offerings, or an innovative financial services
solution for external customers.
This book is full of IT examples but is not limited to IT. Everything that we deliver
day-to-day is a product or a service. The goal of this book is to enable readers (stu-
dents at the graduate or advanced undergraduate level as well as professionals who
want to be equipped with modern knowledge) to succeed in the real world, the world
where everything and anything they do professionally leads to the delivery of a prod-
uct or a service to their customers.
Why This Book?
When I started my professional career in software development in the year
2000, my life was easy: every few weeks, my manager would give me an assign-
ment, and I would be working on it while providing status updates until it was
done. Once I had completed it, I would let my manager know, inform the
quality assurance team, and have it tested by one of my colleagues on the test
team. If everything was fine, I would get a new assignment; in case of any
defects, I would proceed to fix them. My job was clear and simple, and I
xii Preface
enjoyed providing good quality work on time to my manager. I never thought
too much about who was using it and how; I was doing my job diligently day-
to-day and taking pride in growing my mastery.
Then, on a bright morning of September 11, 2001, my husband and I were
driving to our jobs toward Manhattan from Brooklyn where we lived with our
one-year-old son, and we saw papers flying in the air, just regular office papers;
then we saw heavy fog over downtown Manhattan – and we turned on the
radio to find out whether there is a strong wind or a hurricane coming over.
This is how we learned the news. I miraculously made it to my office in
Brooklyn right in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, where my colleague and I
watched the tragedy. One of the senior managers at the NYC Agency for
Child Development, where I was working at that time, was worried whether
her son, who worked for New York City Fire Department (FDNY), was safe.
Later, we found out he was among the first responders to the September 11
events and never made it back. I felt that my personal duty was to support
these people and families of those who suffered in this tragedy, and I applied
for a software development position at FDNY.
After an extensive interviewing process, I joined FDNY, and shortly after that,
I was promoted to a Java team lead. In parallel, I was assigned as an Oracle
Forms and Reports developer (at that time, it was a powerful tool new to the
market) to the division that was responsible for pensions and retirement sup-
port to the FDNY workforce. Soon, I found out that I was not comfortable
working the same way I did before. I was not motivated by designing systems,
giving assignments to my staff, and ensuring that those were delivered with
high quality. I cared about the people we served. Even though I was respon-
sible for the software delivery team, I no longer found satisfaction in just writ-
ing code and building systems; it was important to me what kind of customer
experience those systems provided to the people they served. I did not see
my job as writing code anymore; I saw it as delivering service to our custom-
ers, FDNY employees, the people who made me join FDNY, and whose expe-
rience I cared about.
When my team got an assignment to build a Telemetry system for FDNY
establishing a workflow of prescribing, approving, and distributing controlled
substances by NYC paramedics, I did not call my team to the office for a long
kick-off meeting to discuss phases and deliverables, their own roles, or the
new technology stack. Instead, I called the paramedic running this team and
asked if we could shadow them in the work they are doing every day in the
Telemetry office in Queens, NY. And this is how it started. My team and I
would take our trips to the telemetry station, observe, then go back to the
office to design and build, go back the next day to validate screens and sample
workflows with paramedics, get their feedback, and go back to the office to
make changes based on what we learned. Their existing system was slow and
unreliable; it was based on email and had a heavy paper trail to maintain. We
Preface xiii
learned about their challenges and decided that it had to be a streamlined
workflow with proper tracking, and most importantly, the cycle time from
when the request from the field comes in till the decision is made by a quali-
fied medical professional and approved via the required channels had to be
limited to seconds because it was literally a matter of life and death. We were
not motivated by writing clean code; we were motivated by saving people's
lives, by thinking of those whose lives depend on us. We delivered the mini-
mum viable product, or MVP (at that time, we were not familiar with this
term), Telemetry system in three months to the highest satisfaction of our
stakeholders and got the FDNY award for this application.
Frankly, at that time, we were not aware that the world was already open to
these principles. The Agile Manifesto was already created in 2001. The under-
standing of customer interaction, the value of incremental delivery, the con-
cept of MVP, and the benefit of developers working with the business and
their customers were already known to the software world. However, my
personal journey to Agile software development taught me these values
through my own life experience, and it became my life goal to share them
with others.
In over 20 subsequent years of my professional career, having led organiza-
tions in their digital transformations and changing the ways thousands of peo-
ple deliver IT products to the customers, I have not been more proud of the
work that my team has done. Nowadays, when I interview software develop-
ers and ask them what their biggest professional passion is, I hear a lot that
they enjoy learning about new technologies, writing elegant code, implement-
ing cutting-edge IT solutions, or designing new cloud infrastructure, but fre-
quently, they are missing the most important part of software delivery – the
product we are building and the customers we are building it for. This is the
passion I pass to my students of Agile Project Management and Principles of
IT Project Management at New York University – passion for Building the
Right Product along with Building the Product Right – and now I am passing
it to you.
Why Today?
Despite Agile software delivery becoming a mainstream way of delivering IT
products and services to customers, our higher education institutions are still
significantly behind in the way we educate our students. I am proud to be part
of a team that makes an effort to build education around customer-centricity
and product-based thinking. The concepts of design thinking, validated learn-
ing, user research, and incremental delivery are now included in college cur-
ricula around the world.
However, this process is still slow, and many higher education organizations
are still teaching their IT students based on traditional concepts of phased