Managing Large Backlogs

Scheduling, Sequencing & Selection Using Risk Assessment Frameworks and Cost of Delay Analysis

Learn to prioritize better and faster. Make better, fact-based, more defensible decisions.

This class teaches you a fast, light-weight and yet very powerful approach to deciding what do to next, which order to do things, when to start something and how to manage a very large set of choices, using fact-based, filtering techniques similar to those seen on travel booking web sites.

The use of fact-based risk assessment, risk assessment frameworks, demand-shaping thresholds, and qualitative understanding of cost of delay, will enable faster, better decision making, for scheduling, sequencing and selection of work.

If you’ve found yourself, questioning your actions and judgment, in denial of guessing and manipulating your equations in order to get to the right answer, if you’ve often felt like an imposter in your role as a product manager or product owner, if “prioritization” is your job, then this class will provide answers to questions that have been frustrating you for years. Using these techniques, you’ll gain confidence, you’ll make better, more defensible decisions, and you will gain mastery of your responsibilities.

Risk assessment is _the_ essential skill for product owners and this intensive 1-day class will teach you how to use it.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn why almost everything you’ve ever read about Cost of Delay is wrong, or at least, not applicable in your context
• Learn to understand cost of delay properly, both qualitatively, and quantitatively
• Learn the 3-dimensions of qualitative cost of delay assessment: shape, impact and shelf-life (or product lifecycle)
• Learn the four-category taxonomy of qualitative cost of delay shape assessment
• Learn to create fact-based taxonomies that describe attributes of work requests
• Learn to recognize whether a taxonomy has nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio nature to it
• Learn how to use taxonomies to classify and manage risk
• Learn our catalog of commonly recurring or frequently useful risk taxonomies
• Learn how to build a custom risk assessment framework from multiple taxonomies
• Learn how to apply risk hedging strategies by allocating capacity to work with different classes of risk
• Learn how to use capacity allocation and demand-shaping thresholds to facilitate filtering and selection
• Learn to create interval or ratio taxonomies for impact and shelf-life
• Learn how to integrate cost of delay assessment into a general risk assessment framework
• Learn how to use risk assessment frameworks to filter large backlogs down to a manageable human scale and make fast, impactful, fact-based, fully defensible decisions on scheduling, sequencing and selection of work

Who Should Attend?

This class is for anyone who does “prioritization” for a living: product managers; product owners, service request managers, marketing directors, and executives who set strategy and manage portfolios and programs. It is appropriate for anyone performing the following functions: strategic planning; product management; product design; service implementation/dispatching; product ownership; and portfolio management.

This class is useful for anyone who finds current techniques are often time-consuming and speculative, where consensus is hard to achieve, and decisions are often difficult to defend when challenged. If you spend days on prioritization and selection of new work, and often the meetings are intense, stressful, and frustrating then this risk assessment technique will cut right through these problems. Exponents of the method often report that prioritization meetings with many stakeholders can be resolved in 20-30 minutes with strong consensus.

Prerequisites:

There are no specific prerequisites for this class. It is recommended that attendees have a business background or a role in marketing, strategic planning or portfolio management. A business degree or formal qualification in business is not necessary but attendees with such a background may find the contrasts with familiar material to be either interest or challenging. Prior knowledge of Kanban may also enhance the learning experience but is certainly not required.

Course Outline:

Agenda

• Understanding cost of delay
• Patterns of cost of delay

Break

• Using cost of delay to make scheduling decisions
• Risk taxonomies
• 3-Dimensions of qualitative cost of delay and suitable taxonomies for each

Lunch

• Commonly recurring risk taxonomies
• Risk assessment frameworks

Break

• Risk hedging using capacity allocation
• Demand-shaping using thresholds and filters
• Making scheduling, sequencing and selection decisions
• Discussion: Insights from today’s lessons. How will Fit for Purpose affect how you run your business? What will you change? How might you integrate the ideas with things you already do? What are the actionable, pragmatic ideas you are taking away and intend to implement? 

5-day all inclusive APPS Series

• Better KPIs: Metrics for Meaningful Organizational Behavior
• Clear Product Requirements
• Managing Large Backlogs
• Managing Dependencies for Enterprise Agility
• Forecasting Projects and Customer Deliveries

Class Materials:

All students will receive a read only student edit of the classroom Powerpoint, a copy of the 2nd Edition of the book, Fit for Purpose – How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers by David J. Anderson & Alexei Zheglov, and a printed copy of the Fit for Purpose infographic poster.