Renee, Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia and sit down with Adrian Fittolani from Envato and discuss program management and monte carlo simulations. Renee also makes an estimate that is super accurate!

• Envato – a marketplace for creative assets
• Lisa Frazier talk at Agile Australia “Leadership in the Digital World“
• utilise bottom up program management at Envato, they have 4 main themes as a company and use self organising themes to meet those themes
• had to evolve from co-located teams as could not find local resources, they now have any person working in any team wherever they are and make that work, they try to keep teams in close timezones and use asynchronous communication tools, have a policy to work anywhere and additionally a policy to travel and work from anywhere in the world for 3 months
• the teams responsibility is to radiate program status, currently using a short document with a timeline view
• launch wall for important items kicking off in the next 2 weeks – helps eliminate surprises
• project is where more than one team is involved, form a circle around the project (like holacracy)
• Renee and Craig’s talk at Agile Australia “Coaching Nightmares: Insights We Can Learn from Gordon Ramsay“
• Adrian’s talk at Agile Australia “Better Project Forecasts without Estimates – The Monte Carlo“
• monte carlo simulation- replace subjective estimation techniques that most projects use and rather use a lean approach of takt time to model a project teams delivery
• takt time – the drumbeat, the time it takes for a process to deliver to another process (e.g. how often a car comes off the production line or how often a story is delivered)
• value of monte carlo is that it is non-subjective as well as allowing you to decide on the spread of risk you are prepared to take
• Adrian’s article “Agile Project Forecasting – The Monte Carlo Method” and the associated link to the Takt Time Project Simulation spreadsheet

TheAgileRevolution-131 (28 minutes)