Thoughts

Program reporting is usually treated as an afterthought—a collection of charts that only scratch the surface, while the TPM has to fill in the gaps with details like realistic velocity, future plans, or expected effort. So why are we, or our stakeholders, forced to jump through all these hoops? It only creates friction between departments. That’s where Projected Velocity steps in.

Agile is a developer’s ideology that does not easily integrate with business planning and communication. Through the use of esoteric terminology to distinguish new concepts from exiting processes, Agile ended up complicating how programs are communicated to leadership, and this created more opportunities for misalignment. Returning to our linguistic comfort zone of familiar terminology and common definitions will allow us to communicate more clearly to our partners and stakeholders by making our program plan more accessible to non-program team members.

Our partners’ and stakeholders’ perspectives define the data we need, and we can collect it with virtually no overhead by using thoughtful processes built upon common language to create natural checkpoints.

Jira is the lifeblood of an organization. Within the databases of this tool exists product roadmaps, initiative planning, engineering development, service engineering support, capacity planning, and a host of other mission-critical data that enable analysis of the operational performance of the business; however, the application is often misused in an attempt to give teams more autonomy. By investing time to understand the impacts of upstream decisions and removing process and reporting friction, companies and departments can improve the daily lives of their employees, which promotes better communication, partnerships, and aligned expectations.