{"id":131,"date":"2008-08-05T07:46:37","date_gmt":"2008-08-05T15:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/?p=131"},"modified":"2008-08-05T22:22:11","modified_gmt":"2008-08-06T06:22:11","slug":"jean-tabaka-on-teams-product-owners-and-decision-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/2008\/08\/05\/jean-tabaka-on-teams-product-owners-and-decision-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean Tabaka on Teams, Product Owners, and Decision Making"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an interview you can view\u00a0at InfoQ, Jean Tabaka talks about the difficulties of decision making for Product Owners\u00a0on an Agile project, and an approach called RAPID Management that provides a model for being an effective Product Owner.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here is the link: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.infoq.com\/interviews\/Agile-Jean-Tabaka\">http:\/\/www.infoq.com\/interviews\/Agile-Jean-Tabaka<\/a>#<\/p>\n<p>I have read Jean&#8217;s book on collaboration as well as\u00a0articles by her, and find I always find a lot of value in her writings.\u00a0 This interview is particularly relevant and useful\u00a0to me this week as I am working on ideas to make\u00a0planning and decision making more effective for the teams I work with.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>One thing\u00a0I found particularly helpful is Jean&#8217;s comments about the difficulty some people have taking on the role of a decision maker.\u00a0 Although Agile emphasizes collaborative decision making, most organizations still expect someone (that is, some individual) to take responsibility for the decisions made.\u00a0 In a Scrum environment, for example, it is the Product Owner who has responsibility for decisions about what gets worked on.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Although this pressure and stress of decision making is real, as Agilists we have an approach and some practices\u00a0that help to reduce or even remove this stress.\u00a0\u00a0We\u00a0understand that decisions need to be made at the &#8220;last responsible\u00a0moment&#8221; and that we can steer development using\u00a0a toolset or practices\u00a0designed to address and remove the &#8220;single wringable neck&#8221; problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Practices such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>rapid feedback<\/li>\n<li>on-going collaboration with customers and end users<\/li>\n<li>working with Sprints (or iterations) that allow us to take on small, human digestible chunks<\/li>\n<li>regression and unit tests in place that help\u00a0take the pain out of making changes<\/li>\n<li>emergent design and continual attention to technical excellence<\/li>\n<li>and so on<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In the Agile world mistakes\u00a0aren&#8217;t as costly as they are in a traditional waterfall project.\u00a0\u00a0Because we are delivering value rapidly and visibly\u00a0we can learn from our mistakes as they happen and apply what we learn in the next Sprint, instead of 6 months later during\u00a0some &#8220;stabilization&#8221; phase\u00a0when it is impossible to recover.\u00a0 Most decisions are relatively small allowing us to move forward confidently without fear that we&#8217;re making big, costly mistakes.\u00a0 We can grow our knowledge rapidly and making\u00a0correct\u00a0decisions becomes easier as we go.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This is a big part of what I enjoy and treasure about Agile.\u00a0 The end result is that we can make decisions with\u00a0less stress knowing that we have gathered enough knowledge to make\u00a0good decisions, and that no\u00a0mistake is a show stopper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an interview you can view\u00a0at InfoQ, Jean Tabaka talks about the difficulties of decision making for Product Owners\u00a0on an Agile project, and an approach called RAPID Management that provides a model for being an effective Product Owner.\u00a0 Here is the link: http:\/\/www.infoq.com\/interviews\/Agile-Jean-Tabaka# I have read Jean&#8217;s book on collaboration as well as\u00a0articles by her, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-agile-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zuill.us\/WoodyZuill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}