SAFe® Program Predictability Measure Worksheet Tool

A free tool provided by blogagility.com and your humble blogger Marshall Guillory.

A SAFe way to calculate the Program Predictability Measure

Occasionally I get requests from folks asking about a working version of the charting tool used to display the SAFe Program Predictability Measure (PPM) for an Agile Release Train (ART). I was serving it on a case by case basis up until now. Something must be going on because I’ve had quite a few requests in the past few weeks. Make some noise folks! In the interest of efficiency I’m just going to publish it so you may download it at your leisure.

Well, here is the tool provided free of charge with a Creative Commons Attribution license, please. No warranty or support is implied or provided with this spreadsheet. If you would like to inquire about my consulting services please visit agilerising.com.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The “51331 memo” and the origins of product management – Carnegie Mellon School of Business

Read the article
The “51331 memo” and the origins of product management

User stories are integral to SAFe

Contrary to a recent post from a SAFe competitor, the various SAFe course materials include many examples of user stories from user personas as well as examples from system personas.

This post was very easy to disprove by looking only into two SAFe courses, SAFe for Teams 5.0 and POPM 5.0 where they have over 10 story examples, respectively. In the current versions of the courses, and in previous versions. Additionally, SAFe has available a Story Writing Workshop that includes many, many more examples of stories and guidance on how to write quality stories.

All of the courseware supporting Team & Technical Agility includes guidance tools such as “The Three C’s”, decomposition patterns, explanations of how to use personas, Lean UX, et cetera. We even reference Mike Cohn’s work in several cases.

Additionally, not every SAFe course needs to have explanations of user stories/stories as the courses are role based. To learn more read the 12 articles on the SAFe Implementation Roadmap.

Sorry, Dov Tsal, but your assertions about the SAFe in this case are incorrect. Good effort though.

Christensen – How will you measure your life?

Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake

We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.

Clayton Christensen – HBR article

Recommended read at: https://hbr.org/2010/07/how-will-you-measure-your-life

Greg Coticchia: 4-UP: Prioritize This, Product Manager

An excellent article on techniques for prioritization from Greg Coticcia.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/4-up-prioritize-product-manager-greg-coticchia/