About the Book
The Agile Guide to Business Analysis and Planning provides practical guidance for eliminating unnecessary errors and delays in agile product development through effective planning, backlog refinement and acceptance criteria specification with hard-to-find advice on how and when to analyse the context for complex changes within an agile approach including when to use Journey Maps, Value Stream Mapping, Personas, Story Maps, BPMN, Use Cases and other UML models.
Renowned author and consultant Howard Podeswa teaches best practices drawn from agile and agile-adjacent frameworks, including ATDD, BDD, DevOps, CI/CD, Kanban, Scrum, SAFe, XP, Lean Thinking, Lean Startup, Circumstance-Based Market Segmentation, and theories of disruptive innovation. He offers a comprehensive agile roadmap for analysing customer needs and planning product development, including discussion of legacy business analysis tools that still offer immense value to agile teams.
Using a running case study, Podeswa walks through the full agile product lifecycle, from visioning through release and continuous value delivery. You learn how to carry out agile analysis and planning responsibilities more effectively, using tools such as Kano analysis, minimum viable products (MVPs), minimum marketable features (MMFs), story maps, product roadmaps, customer journey mapping, value stream mapping, spikes, and the definition of ready (DoR). Podeswa presents each technique in context: what you need to know and when to apply each tool.
Master principles, frameworks, concepts, and practices of agile analysis and planning in order to maximise value delivery throughout the product's lifecycle
Explore planning and analysis for short-term, long-term, and scaled agile initiatives using MVPs and data-informed learning to test hypotheses and find high-value features
Split features into MMFs and small stories that deliver significant value and enable quick wins
Refine, estimate, and specify features, stories, and their acceptance criteria, following ATDD/BDD guidance
Address the unique analysis and planning challenges of scaled agile organisations
Implement 13 practices for optimising enterprise agility
Supported by 175+ tools, techniques, examples, diagrams, templates, checklists, and other job aids, this book is a complete toolkit for every practitioner. Whatever your role, you'll find indispensable guidance on agile planning and analysis responsibilities so you can help your organisation respond more nimbly to a fast-changing environment.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: The Art of Agile Analysis and Planning
Chapter 2: Agile Analysis and Planning: The Value Proposition
Chapter 3: Fundamentals of Agile Analysis and Planning
Chapter 4: Analysis and Planning Activities across the Agile Development Lifecycle
Chapter 5: Preparing the Organization
Chapter 6: Preparing the Process
Chapter 7: Visioning
Chapter 8: Seeding the Backlog - Discovering and Grading Features
Chapter 9: Long-Term Agile Planning
Chapter 10: Quarterly and Feature Preparation
Chapter 11: Quarterly and Feature Planning
Chapter 12: MVPs and Story Maps
Chapter 13: Story Preparation
Chapter 14: Iteration and Story Planning
Chapter 15: Rolling Analysis and Preparation - Day-to-Day Activities
Chapter 16: Releasing the Product
Chapter 17: Scaling Agility
Chapter 18: Achieving Enterprise Agility
Appendix A: Additional Resources and Checklists
Appendix B: Discovery-Driven Planning Case Study: BestBots
About the Author :
Howard Podeswa is Director for Noble Inc. and is an established author, professional artist, and sought-after speaker at international conferences. Podeswa's career in software development began with an academic background in nuclear physics, which led to him work on a nuclear-accident simulation program for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. From the 1990s on, he has been helping large organizations transition their planning, analysis, and requirements engineering (RE) processes to agile practices across a broad range of sectors, including telecommunications, banking, government services, insurance, and healthcare. He plays a leading role in the industry as a designer of agile and business analysis (BA) training programs for companies and higher education institutions, including Boston University Corporate Education Center and Humber College; as a reviewer of the BA profession's standard books of best practices (BABOK (IIBA) and Business Analysis for Practitioners - A Practice Guide (PMI)); and as an author whose books have become staples in many BA libraries: The Business Analyst's Handbook and UML for the IT Business Analyst.
