If you are working in multiple projects, then you know how complicated it is to track and clear blocking issues from multiple projects. It’s all to easy to get caught up in the details that you forget about some of the blockers. Two weeks later you remember that the blocker you were supposed to resolve is still there, clogging up the flow.
If you look through the features in your project, you’ll find some that fit the “Fixed Date” class of service. These are work items that need to be completed by a given date. Some examples are
A feature needs to be added in time to meet a regulatory deadline
A feature needs to be shown at an upcoming conference
In these cases, there is a big cost if the feature is not ready by the given date.
Another instance where this is used is in Service Level Agreements. Teams that work under SLAs have to complete features within the timeframe prescribed in the SLA, and there could be penalties if the timeframe is not met. This scenario is particularly common with teams that use Kanban on managing maintenance and support projects.
In this screencast, I show how easy it is to manage SLAs and Fixed Date work items in Silver Catalyst. Take a look below
A lot of emphasis in software development process is placed on project management – making a commitment, planning, and tracking everything so you ensure you don’t drift away from the plan. Funnily enough, many agile projects have also ended up with this ‘form’ of project management.
And don’t get me wrong, it is important not to screw up!
But, in the worry not to screw up, are we losing sight of the opportunity to get better? Do we understand what we are building? Do we know where our bottlenecks are? Are we best aligned to business needs?
So here we go – the showdown between Project Management and Project Intelligence:
We’ve just released a significant update to Silver Stories which vastly improves the integration flow between Stories and Catalyst. Many thanks to all the early users who provided feedback for this.
Here is what the update does:
Every project created in Silver Catalyst has an Icebox page. You can use this page to store all features that are in the pipeline, but still not committed to. Once in a while you’ll go through the Icebox and move some of the upcoming stories into the backlog
You no longer have the concept of Teams. You can now directly allocate stories from the story map to the project
Stories that are allocated on the User Story Map are transferred to the Icebox of the project. From here they team can move it to the appropriate position on the backlog and work on it as usual
I know this is a bit abstract, so if you are using Silver Stories, then send an email to support@toolsforagile.com and we’ll do a personalised half hour demo to show you the simplified integration flow in action.
