Kent J. McDonald

Member for

13 years 8 months

Kent J. McDonald is an author, speaker, and coach who helps organizations improve the effectiveness of their projects. His more than fifteen years of experience includes work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility and currently delivers business analysis training for B2T Training, and shares his thoughts on project effectiveness at BeyondRequirements.com.

Company

Knowledge Bridge Partners

Job Function

Consulting

Job Title

Product Ownership Consultant

Industry

Business Services - Consulting - Non-profit

Interests

Agile

Business Analysis

Lean

Process Improvement

Requirements

Country

United States

Kent J. McDonald

Kent J. McDonald is an author, speaker, and coach. His more than fifteen years of experience includes work in business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is coauthor of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility.

All Articles by Kent J. McDonald

All Stories by Kent J. McDonald

	Is a Framework Needed to Scale Agile?There are varying reactions to using frameworks to scale agile. One concern surrounding the rise of SAFe and DAD is the creation of new methods that are compared with or pitted against existing sets of techniques, fragmenting the agile community. Do you really need a framework to scale agile?
	Rethinking Typical Project Management Approaches"Don't work on projects, work on products!" is a cry often heard in the agile community. But if you have a team pulled together to support an ongoing product, it doesn't make sense to use typical project management techniques. Maybe projects aren't the problem—their organizational structures are.
	Should You Measure Agile Adoption Effectiveness?A frequent question when organizations are moving to agile is "What metrics should we use to measure our agile adoption?" What people really should be asking is "Should we measure our agile adoption?" The trick is to figure out what an appropriate measurement is. Kent McDonald examines some methods.
	Create a Vendor Contract While Keeping AgileWorking with vendors can pose challenges to an agile team, especially when it comes to contracting practices. How do you deal with contract relationships when trying to follow a philosophy that values collaboration over negotiation? Kent McDonald gives some suggestions for creating agile contracts.
	What Is Business Value and How Do You Measure It?Agile approaches have changed the conversation about measuring project success, from comparing against cost, time, and scope projections to looking at how much value the project is going to deliver. The problem that remains, however, is determining what value really is and how to measure it.
	A New Software Development Manifesto for Building the Right Things Author and software consultant Gojko Adzic recently gathered together a group of professionals to discuss software delivery and business outcomes, and to identify the core ideas that could be shared with delivery teams to help them focus on building the right things.
	Reconsidering User Stories User stories, one of the most common agile techniques, are used by delivery teams to support their iterative planning efforts and are typically used to represent items in a backlog. Until recently there has been a general agreement about the form that user stories should take.
	How to Do Agile Release PlanningIn agile, there are different types of planning at various intervals and levels of detail. One of those levels is release planning, which is the intermediary type of planning between deciding what is included in a product and what the delivery team will focus on for the next iteration.
	How Agile Is Akin to Improvisational TheaterKent McDonald explores the idea that using an agile methodology is akin to improvisational theater. Like every metaphor for agile, improv theater does fail in some points, but it can be helpful when viewed from the perspective of collaboration.
	Why the Product Owner's Role Is EvolvingDue to the popularity of Scrum, the idea of having a product owner has taken hold of development professionals and is used by teams that are not even using Scrum. With this industry-wide adoption, the definition of product ownership and the product owner's role has evolved.
	Approaches for Effective Meetings An interesting paradox many project teams face is that while collaboration is highly valued, collaboration often takes the form of one of the biggest time wasters humans have ever invented—meetings. Kent McDonald explores effective approaches to leading an effective meeting.
	What Jobs Do Your Stakeholders Want Done? The jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) theory is intended to help stakeholders think about their products and services by considering how their customers like to use them. Kent McDonald delves into the JTBD theory and its benefits to a product delivery team.
	Get Out There and Learn About Stakeholders' ProblemsOne of the more often repeated phrases from the lean startup and customer development lexicon is the admonition to "get out of the building" in order to meet and learn about customers. What project teams should take away from this idea is the need to interact with stakeholders to address problems.
	Performing Effective Automated Acceptance TestingSoftware development teams that want to automate their regression testing suites may wonder if there is any way to see the forest for the trees regarding their numerous story tests. Kent McDonald explains how to perform effective automated acceptance testing amidst all the noise.