ACP Corporate flashcards

33 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Agile Manifesto four values

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working product over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; responding to change over following a plan. Right-hand items retain value but are weighted lower.

Shu-Ha-Ri

Three stages of skill mastery: Shu, following the rule and imitating form; Ha, understanding and adapting the rule; Ri, transcending form and innovating. Used to judge how much prescribed process a team needs.

Agile onion layers

From outermost to innermost: tools, practices, principles, values, mindset. Adopting new tools without shifting the underlying mindset produces superficial, cargo-cult agility.

Psychological safety

Edmondson's term for a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. It is a precondition for honest retrospectives, surfacing bad news early, and experimentation.

Theory X and Theory Y

McGregor's two assumptions about workers: Theory X holds people avoid work and need supervision; Theory Y holds people are intrinsically motivated. Agile team design assumes Theory Y.

Weighted Shortest Job First

WSJF equals Cost of Delay divided by job duration or size. Cost of Delay sums user value, time criticality, and risk reduction or opportunity enablement. Highest WSJF is scheduled first.

MoSCoW prioritisation

Must have (non-negotiable), Should have (important, workaround exists), Could have (taken only if capacity allows), Won't have this time (explicitly out of current scope). Limit Must-haves to roughly 60% of effort.

Kano model categories

Features classified as Must-be, Performance, Attractive, Indifferent, or Reverse. Must-be absence causes dissatisfaction but presence adds little; Attractive features delight; only Performance features reward more investment linearly.

Flow efficiency formula

Flow efficiency equals value-added process time divided by total lead time. Knowledge work commonly sits below 25%, meaning most improvement opportunity lies in waiting time rather than working time.

MVP versus MMF

Minimum Viable Product is the smallest thing producing validated learning about a business hypothesis. Minimum Marketable Feature is the smallest slice a customer would pay for. MVP targets learning, MMF targets revenue.

Cost of Delay

The economic value lost per unit of time a deliverable is late. Expressed as money per month or week, it converts qualitative urgency into a comparable number for prioritisation.

Power/Interest grid

Stakeholder map with quadrants: high power and high interest, manage closely; high power and low interest, keep satisfied; low power and high interest, keep informed; low power and low interest, monitor.

Stakeholder salience model

Mitchell, Agle and Wood rank stakeholders by power, legitimacy and urgency. Holding all three makes a stakeholder definitive; two makes them expectant; one makes them latent.

Communication channel formula

Number of communication channels equals n times (n minus 1) divided by 2, where n is the number of people. Ten people create 45 channels; each added person adds n channels.

Information radiator

A large, visible display of current project data such as a Kanban board, burndown or cumulative flow diagram, placed where the team and passers-by see it without asking.

Sprint review purpose

A working session where the team demonstrates the completed increment to stakeholders, gathers feedback, and adapts the backlog. It is not a status presentation or a sign-off gate.

Escalation threshold

A pre-agreed rule stating when and to whom an impediment or risk is escalated, for example an unresolved blocker escalates from team to product owner after two working days.

Tuckman team stages

Forming (polite, dependent), Storming (conflict, jockeying), Norming (agreements, cohesion), Performing (autonomous, high output), Adjourning (disbanding). Storming conflict is normal, not failure.

Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes

Five responses to conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating. Collaborating suits important issues with time available; avoiding is legitimate for trivial matters.

Five-step retrospective

Set the stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, close. A retrospective that produces no owned, time-boxed action item has not completed an improvement cycle.

Servant leadership behaviours

Removing impediments, shielding the team from interruption, coaching rather than directing, making work visible, and letting the team own its process and estimates.

Velocity as trailing average

Story points completed per sprint, averaged over the last three to five sprints. Used for one team's forecasting only; never compared across teams or treated as a productivity target.

Planning poker procedure

Each estimator privately chooses a card, all reveal simultaneously, highest and lowest explain their reasoning, then the team re-votes until consensus. Simultaneous reveal prevents anchoring.

Cone of uncertainty

Estimate range at project inception can vary by roughly a factor of four in either direction. The range narrows as work proceeds and unknowns are retired through delivery.

Monte Carlo forecasting

Simulating completion dates by repeatedly sampling historical throughput data. It needs no story-point estimates and suits Kanban teams with stable flow records, producing probabilistic rather than single-date forecasts.

Rolling-wave planning

Detailed planning for the near term and coarse planning for the horizon: sprint planning covers days to weeks, release planning covers months, roadmap covers quarters, refined as knowledge grows.

Little's Law

Average lead time equals average work in progress divided by average throughput. Halving WIP at constant throughput halves lead time, which is the core argument for limiting WIP.

Cycle time versus lead time

Cycle time starts when active work begins on an item; lead time starts when the item enters the system, including queue time. Customers experience lead time, so queues dominate their perception.

Cumulative flow diagram signals

Widening vertical bands indicate work in progress growing faster than completion; a flat top band means intake stopped; a flat bottom band means delivery is blocked.

Control chart rules

Plot a metric such as cycle time per item with mean and three-sigma limits. Points beyond the limits, or non-random runs and trends, indicate special-cause variation worth investigating.

Definition of Done

A shared checklist making completion objective, such as code reviewed, tests passing, documentation updated, deployed to staging. It applies to every increment, not only releases.

Agile fitness functions

Automated, continuously evaluated governance checks such as coverage thresholds, security scans and compliance rules. They replace periodic stage gates by keeping the product inside acceptable bounds at all times.

Risk exposure formula

Risk exposure equals probability multiplied by impact. Response options are avoid, mitigate, transfer, accept, and exploit for positive risks or opportunities.