Amazon agile project management handbook

The Amazon experience shows us that the single biggest opportunity for companies operating today is to completely rethink their concept of metrics.

Your business should operate like a nuclear reactor. If a problem arises, you need to be aware of it immediately. At Amazon, the external customer viewpoint is built into activities and capabilities from the outset.

No significant new activity can be undertaken at Amazon unless and until there is an exhaustive management review of a six-page document explaining the activity as a narrative. As Rossman says:. Writing ideas and proposals in complete narratives results in better ideas, more clarity on the ideas, and better conversation on the ideas… The initiatives will be smaller and less risky.

Writing narratives is hard, takes a long time, and is an acquired skill for the organization. High standards and an appreciation for building this capability over time are required.

There is also a set of metrics by which customer benefits of the activity will be measured in real time. These documents are rigorously reviewed by a group of senior managers before work on the activity begins.

Once an activity is approved and funded, the work begins and the planning documents are steadily updated as more information becomes available. Through its real-time customer metrics, each team reports in effect to the entire senior management, not just a direct boss. By removing middle management as a significant actor from the process with its own separate goals and priorities, Amazon largely eliminates inter-unit game-playing.

As Rossman points out, at Amazon:. Leaders are owners. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. Senior managers are often put in charge of important initiatives with relatively modest staff resources. At Amazon, senior managers are doers, not merely overseers of others. Not so at Amazon, where senior people are often dedicated to leading new big bets. Executive compensation at Amazon is aligned with these principles. Executives have relatively modest salaries plus stock.

Their compensation is not differentiated in terms of the performance of their own units. There is thus no use of or need for share buybacks to goose the short-term stock price: Amazon has too many good new ideas that it wants to use its resources for. Amazon is known as a demanding place to work.

Aggressive for people to produce and have mastery of their domain. Aggressive for teams and leaders to achieve the impossible: perfection. At Amazon, Two-Pizza Teams work like semi-independent entrepreneurial hothouses. Two-Pizza Teams are organized around capabilities and services as opposed to projects.

Work is expected to continue for more than two years at a minimum, and it is improved through iteration. Please wait while you are redirected to the right page Remember me. Forgot your password? Not a member yet? Register Now. User registration You don't have permission to register Login. Reset Password. CEO Jeff Bezos announced this in his letter to shareholders and Amazon has relentlessly stuck to that obsession ever since.

As Rossman explains:. Customer obsession at Amazon goes beyond customer satisfaction. It means a drive for continuing to improve the customer experience. It came from understanding that the customer experience was greatly affected by flexibility, speed, and quality of delivery. Amazon Web Services AWS did not come from wanting to be a cloud technology company but from needing to provide a scalable infrastructure to provide a great online customer experience.

Customer obsession at Amazon is enabled and driven by customer-driven metrics. In most big organizations, customer data—where it exists at all—is spotty and soft, while financial data is hard and ubiquitous. Guess what drives decision-making?

Not so at Amazon, where real-time customer metrics are built into every aspect of the work. Rossman then proceeded to develop real-time measures for each aspect of delivering this capability. Teams may spend weeks just thinking through the metrics. It takes foresight to lead by the numbers correctly. You must embed real-time metrics from the very start of a program because they are nearly impossible to retrofit. The Amazon experience shows us that the single biggest opportunity for companies operating today is to completely rethink their concept of metrics.

Your business should operate like a nuclear reactor. If a problem arises, you need to be aware of it immediately. At Amazon, the external customer viewpoint is built into activities and capabilities from the outset. No significant new activity can be undertaken at Amazon unless and until there is an exhaustive management review of a six-page document explaining the activity as a narrative.

As Rossman says:. Writing ideas and proposals in complete narratives results in better ideas, more clarity on the ideas, and better conversation on the ideas… The initiatives will be smaller and less risky. Writing narratives is hard, takes a long time, and is an acquired skill for the organization. High standards and an appreciation for building this capability over time are required.

There is also a set of metrics by which customer benefits of the activity will be measured in real time. These documents are rigorously reviewed by a group of senior managers before work on the activity begins. Once an activity is approved and funded, the work begins and the planning documents are steadily updated as more information becomes available. Through its real-time customer metrics, each team reports in effect to the entire senior management, not just a direct boss.

By removing middle management as a significant actor from the process with its own separate goals and priorities, Amazon largely eliminates inter-unit game-playing.

As Rossman points out, at Amazon:. Leaders are owners.