The Service Feature Groups are the core vehicles for moving the user stories during development. Assembling the user stories into the SFGs™ is the responsibility of the Program Director who is also responsible for the final prioritization of the SFGs. The SFG™ is a "Feature Group" and serves as a container to facilitate the organization of stories into logical groupings for development by the service team. After completing the work for the service represented by the user stories and the completed work has been integrated into production, the SFG™ serves as the archival record for the completed user stories.
As part of the SFG assembly responsibility, the program manager is responsible for understanding the organizational objectives and the epics that result from the corporate planning meetings, and how those goals should drive the value creation as represented by the user stories.
For any additional and ongoing clarification about the strategy and goals, the program manager or director has direct access to the executive staff that created the objectives. The program director works with both the executive steering, the functional requirements team and the functional manager as needed to perform their responsibilities efficiently. While it rests with the Program Director to lead the assemblage of user stories into SFGs, he/she should also get assistance from, and work together with the functional team and functional director.
The program manager is also responsible for understanding how the stories in the SFGs will fit into the continually evolving solution. The development order should maximize value to the company while at the same time minimize dependencies.
Because of the fluid nature of the Kanban delivery flow, there are no strict rules about how large and SFG should be, but as a starting point for an organization that is adopting AASF, constraining an SFG to what should likely be possible for a team of nine in two months is a good starting point.
AASF™ Requirements Planning
AASF™ Team Responsibilities
AASF™ Team Structure
Agilest® AAPM™ - Adaptive-Agile™ Program Manager
AARD™ - Adaptive-Agile™ Resource Director
Agilest® AASP™ - Adaptive-Agile™ Scaling Professional