Agile Productivity Unleashed

Proven approaches for achieving productivity gains in any organisation

Jamie Lynn Cooke

• Editore: IT Governance Ltd
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781849285650
• Edizione: 2
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Project Management

In this new edition of her award-winning book, Jamie Lynn Cooke explains the principles of Agile, shows why it works, and demonstrates how to use Agile to significantly increase productivity, quality, and customer satisfaction in any industry.

It shows how Agile approaches can give you:

• A faster, more flexible and highly responsive framework, allowing your organisation to leverage internal and external changes more quickly.
• Significantly more efficient use of resources and time, freeing up staff for greater innovation and value creation.
• Direct stakeholder engagement, resulting in better customer relationships and more compelling product development.

Written for managers and business professionals, the book presents a range of proven Agile methods including Scrum®, Kanban, Feature Driven Development™ (FDD™) and the Dynamic Systems Development Method® (DSDM®) in clear business language.  The author then devotes a chapter to each of the 12 Agile principles that make these approaches consistently successful, and details how to use these methods to tackle the core challenges faced by every organization.

The book concludes with in-depth case study that compares Agile with traditional approaches for achieving three common business objectives, followed by step-by-step guidelines to making Agile work for your organization, and a range of resources for further reading.

Read this book and learn how to unleash the potential of Agile in your organization.

 

SECTION 1: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT AGILE

CHAPTER 1: AGILE IN A NUTSHELL

This chapter explains each of the core Agile principles in clear business language, demonstrates how they have revolutionized one market sector (the information technology industry); introduces popular Agile practices and techniques that put these principles into action; and profiles some of the prominent organizations which have successfully adopted these Agile approaches, including Nokia Siemens Networks, Yahoo! and BT.

Understanding Agile principles

Embracing change

At the core of Agile principles is the understanding that change is an inevitable – and essential – part of any business. Market needs evolve, project funding gets re-allocated and staff move on. An organization which expects and embraces change in customer requirements, market demand, supply chain provision and internal resource availability has a significant competitive advantage over less responsive organizations.

Responsive planning

Responsive planning to accommodate inevitable internal and external changes is at the heart of Agile approaches. Because change is an inevitable part of business, Agile approaches avoid creating extensive upfront documents that endeavor to predict business requirements, costs and timeframes over the long term. Instead, Agile approaches are based around the iterative delivery of business value in short timeframes (usually every two to four weeks), with ongoing planning based on the feedback received from key stakeholders at each iteration.

This drive for responsive planning is most succinctly described in the Agile philosophy: ‘Apply, Inspect, Adapt.’ Responsive planning allows for changes in the business environment (e.g. a change in market demand) to be almost immediately reflected in the iterative activities undertaken by staff members – instead of waiting several weeks (and sometimes months) for an updated plan to be agreed, released and implemented.

Frequent and continuous business value

The goal of each Agile iteration is to provide stakeholders with frequent and continuous business value, so that the organization can benefit more quickly from their investment in money, people and time. Agile approaches are designed so that each iterative delivery contains the highest-priority items identified by the business to the greatest extent that can be provided in the time allocated. This results in each deliverable having immediate value for the business, thus maximizing the effort of each resource to focus on high-priority activities, and minimizing the likelihood of unnecessary work being done.

Importantly, Agile approaches also provide the organization with the opportunity to review tangible outputs at each delivery point, to redirect efforts (where required), and to determine whether further budget expenditure should be focused on additional work in this area – or reallocated to higher priority business activities across the organization.

Direct stakeholder engagement

So, how do Agile delivery teams ensure that their deliverables continuously meet the needs of the organization? The most effective way to ensure ongoing business value is to directly involve key internal and external stakeholders in the process. (When was the last time you included customer service representatives in the review of proposed products? Or invited prospective investors to comment on the draft annual plan?)

Representative stakeholders participate as active members of the Agile team during the process, providing the team with real-time input and hands-on feedback at two key points in the process:

• At the start of each iteration to describe and prioritize their business requirements.
• At the end of each iteration to review and assess outputs against their stated requirements.

Ideally, these stakeholders are also able to make themselves available to the team during each iteration, to respond to questions and review work while it is being completed. The more available stakeholders are to the Agile team throughout the process, the closer that each deliverable will be to meeting the true needs of the organization. However, Agile approaches are also realistic in understanding that the full-time allocation of a key internal resource – or ongoing availability of an external customer – is not always possible. The objective for an Agile organization is to create this opportunity wherever possible, but no less than at the start and end of each iteration.

Regular face-to-face communication

Agile approaches strongly advocate that the most effective way to actively involve stakeholders in the process is through face-to-face communication (which can include online meetings where required). The underlying premise is that business requirements are most clearly stated (and clarified) in a forum where people can

• Respond to each other in real-time.
• Draw diagrams on a whiteboard that others can immediately provide feedback on.
• Get a firsthand perspective on each stakeholder’s reaction.

Conference calls and e-mails can be used (where required) to clarify ongoing questions during the iteration; but the description of the business requirements at the start of each iteration – and review of outputs at the end of each iteration – require physical (or virtual) face-to-face communication in order for these sessions to be effective. In the Agile world, there is no point where a pile of documentation is an acceptable substitute for active face-to-face communication.

Minimizing waste

The Agile imperative to deliver the highest business value possible in a short timeframe results in the added benefit of minimizing waste in work undertaken. Effort is not expended on low priority items that are less likely to be needed by the business, resulting in a reduced likelihood of over-production by the team. Regular feedback from stakeholders helps to ensure that ongoing efforts continue to be focused on the highest value activities.

Short timeframes also mean that, even if the team goes slightly off-track in one iteration, the cost to the organization is contained. Activities can be ended when the team has delivered every outcome that the organization considers essential – versus maintaining teams to meet pre-determined timeframes or budget allocations.

Agile approaches also minimize waste by encouraging employees to make business processes and deliverables as efficient as possible. This not only assists employees in delivering value within a short timeframe; it allows these processes and deliverables to be more readily reused and expanded upon in the future.

Tangible outputs

Agile methods work on the basis that the best way to measure the progress of work is not to create endless status reports, but to review the tangible outputs of the work as the primary measure of progress. Status reports are often time-consuming, generally sanitized for management review and can be designed to give the reader a false sense of security that things are progressing on track. Tangible outputs, on the other hand, are irrefutable indicators of the ongoing success or failure of each Agile team’s activities.

Most important, however, is the effect that producing tangible outputs has on the way in which Agile teams undertake their work. The drive to deliver tangible outputs in short iterations forces the team to touch on every stage of the delivery process, from planning and design to quality control, packaging and presentation. It forces the team to avoid endless planning meetings and infinite rethinking of ideas before action is taken. It requires the team to go through every stage of the process upfront, providing an early identification of risks and hurdles that are likely to impact ongoing delivery. Arguably the most valuable outcome, it gives team members the satisfaction of regularly seeing tangible results from their efforts, providing them with inspiration and motivation for their ongoing work.

Empowering the team

Agile approaches rely on the mutual trust (and dependency) that emerges between stakeholders and delivery team members: delivery teams depend upon the expertise of stakeholders to accurately communicate and prioritize the business requirements; and stakeholders equally depend upon the expertise of the delivery team members to regularly produce outcomes that meet these requirements. If either group falters, the process fails.

It is this interdependency that makes Agile approaches so compelling for employees. Stakeholders are responsible for guiding the business priorities and for measuring the outcomes of each iteration, but they are not the people who determine the volume of work that can be achieved in that short timeframe. Instead, stakeholders defer to the multi-skilled delivery team to advise them on the actual work required to achieve their objectives, the estimated time for each task, and what the delivery team can realistically achieve in an iteration given their current workload and other commitments.

The structure of Agile approaches also means that stakeholders do not need to keep a close watch of every step that the delivery team makes, because they know that they are never more than a few weeks away from seeing the results of their work. Throughout each iteration, stakeholders also have the ability to both sit in on the delivery team’s daily status reviews and to monitor the overall progress of the team through real-time status tracking tools. This means that stakeholders can be confident that work is progressing without having to constantly monitor the delivery team, and delivery team members are entrusted, empowered and left alone to do the work that they have committed to.

The interesting thing about this dynamic is that, as it progresses, it is able to feed off itself to create ongoing motivation for employees. Delivery team members know that their continued ability to self-manage their work depends on their regular delivery of high-value business outcomes. Additionally, because they are the ones who identify what work can (and cannot) be achieved in each iteration, they are motivated by their personal responsibility to achieve these outcomes. This combination of factors is heightened by the satisfaction and pride that delivery team members feel when they produce tangible outputs that truly meet the needs of the organization.

Quality by design

The requirement for Agile delivery teams to regularly deliver tangible outputs in each iteration makes quality control essential throughout the process. In order to be able to respond to stakeholders in short timeframes, deliverables must be designed to accommodate ongoing change. Agile teams learn early on that maintaining the quality, flexib...