Best of PPM: February 2020

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WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION THIS MONTH

Project names matter. "A project name is that first impression which you'll never get a second chance to make. It is the elevator pitch for your elevator pitch about the project."

For a better meeting, design your agenda as a set of questions. Replacing laundry lists of topics by questions encourages you to think critically about the meaning of a topic, and what you ultimately expect from it.

Too many dependencies? Your ART (Agile Release Train) might be made of the wrong teams. It's OK for teams to occasionally depend on one another. But there shouldn't be more dependencies than features on the board.

Change management requires change management. For effective change management, you need to apply the same change management techniques to your own work as you do to the teams you help.

Improve your daily scrums with these 10 techniques. Efficient and effective daily scrums are a hallmark of high-performing Scrum teams. Mike Cohn, one of the founders of Scrum, shares his top 10 techniques.

It helps to think of Product Management in terms of deliverables. Mastering the craft of product manage

ment is not easy. But thinking in terms of deliverables in each of the four dimensions of vision, strategy, design and execution can help identify great work, and hone your skills.

Your product backlog doesn't have to be a list. Anthony Murphy offers eight different ways to organize your backlog to make it more impactful.

It's worth learning to ask better questions. Using neutral questions to look closer at people's subjective experience can help everyone get back to the original facts, and dramatically improve understanding.

A QUOTE THAT MADE US LAUGH

"If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings'."

- Dave Barry