Publications

This page provides a summary and recap of the Webinar: 'Epic Failures and a couple of successes too, Patterns and anti-patterns in Lean Portfolio Management', that took place on the 12th March 2025.

How do introverts handle PI Planning? Surely a big noisy room, full of people, is absolute hell from them? Which led me to ask myself the question; as an introvert how do I survive PI Planning; and I’ve survived 15 years of planning events, mostly unscathed.

The second in a pair of blogs that deep dive into Slicing Features. This blog looks at how the slicing patterns can be utilised in practice to break down large endeavours.

Stories, or User Stories, are a common way to express each backlog item for a single team to complete within one Iteration or Sprint. Lots has been written over the years about how to write good stories; so why are so many stories still bad? In this webinar we describe where the user story concept came from, the true purpose of stories and explain ways that teams can avoid falling into the trap of doing work rather than delivering value. We describe how in SAFe the purpose of stories can be different to other agile development practices, since SAFe describes a Feature as being a releasable item, not an individual story. And we explain strategies to slice a SAFe Feature into stories.

A single backlog of work shared by many people focuses and aligns their work towards the most important work items. In SAFe, an ART Backlog of Features is used to align the work of multiple teams in the ART to the most important work items. However there are many pitfalls that must be avoided when writing Features for the ART backlog. Bad Features will result in poor work throughput, unaligned and disempowered teams. In this webinar we describe some of the strategies you can follow when writing Features to encourage agility as well as improve productivity.

A single backlog of work shared by many people focuses and aligns their work towards the most important work items. In SAFe, an ART Backlog of Features is used to align the work of multiple teams in the ART to the most important work items. However there are many pitfalls that must be avoided when writing Features for the ART backlog. Bad Features will result in poor work throughput, unaligned and disempowered teams. In this webinar we describe some of the strategies you can follow when writing Features to encourage agility as well as improve productivity.

How do Epics get work done? How do they get work done in a manner that respects the Lean/Agile Principles and Values rather than replicating the old processes.

What should you be considering when approving Epics? The Epic needs to be considered within the context of the Portfolio rather than in isolation. What is that wider portfolio context?

Free Scaled Agile Framework® Webinar Series! We’re excited to announce a new, completely free upcoming webinar series to help guide you on writing better Epics, Features, and User Stories in SAFe...