Chris Shinkle
Director of Innovation - SEP
Chris is a practitioner and maker. He is a thought leader and continually initiates new ideas and continuous improvement at SEP. His experience comes from building products with many large clients in a variety of industries: aerospace, medical, healthcare, finance, etc. He introduced and guided SEPʼs adoption of Agile software development practices in 2004 followed by Lean and Kanban in 2007.
As SEPʼs Director of Innovation, Chris leverages many community ideas helping SEP engineers and clients delivery better products. Chris speaks at conferences across the United States promoting Agile, Lean/Kanban, Product Management, and Design Thinking. Chris was an inaugural members of Indiana’s Techpoint Tech 25
Delivering in Bets: How Betting Will Improve Your Delivery Strategy
Defining a delivery strategy can be difficult. We tend to underestimate the risk, aren't explicit about our assumptions, and don't involve the delivery team early in the process. I recently introduced the idea of delivering in bets to several clients. The idea that each delivery is a series of bets with different odds and risks. Each bet or investment could be matched with our corresponding confidence levels. For those bets deemed risky, we could improve our odds by placing smaller bets. Delivering in bets helped us to remain outcome focused, look at our decisions as a portfolio, and express the expected timeframe of a payouts. In each case, mindsets shifted and delivery performance improved.
In this talk, Chris will demonstrate how using bets reshaped the way clients approached delivery. He'll show how using some familiar tools such as Story Mapping, Assumption Mapping, and Monte Carlo Forecasting can improve results. He'll discuss different methods for defining and sizing releases. Participants will leave with a new approach for identifying and forecasting a delivery.
Defining a delivery strategy can be difficult. We tend to underestimate the risk, aren't explicit about our assumptions, and don't involve the delivery team early in the process. I recently introduced the idea of delivering in bets to several clients. The idea that each delivery is a series of bets with different odds and risks. Each bet or investment could be matched with our corresponding confidence levels. For those bets deemed risky, we could improve our odds by placing smaller bets. Delivering in bets helped us to remain outcome focused, look at our decisions as a portfolio, and express the expected timeframe of a payouts. In each case, mindsets shifted and delivery performance improved.
In this talk, Chris will demonstrate how using bets reshaped the way clients approached delivery. He'll show how using some familiar tools such as Story Mapping, Assumption Mapping, and Monte Carlo Forecasting can improve results. He'll discuss different methods for defining and sizing releases. Participants will leave with a new approach for identifying and forecasting a delivery.
In this talk, Chris will demonstrate how using bets reshaped the way clients approached delivery. He'll show how using some familiar tools such as Story Mapping, Assumption Mapping, and Monte Carlo Forecasting can improve results. He'll discuss different methods for defining and sizing releases. Participants will leave with a new approach for identifying and forecasting a delivery.