Tag Archives: Agile

Secrets of Successful Projects

I’ve had the good fortune to have been involved in many successful application development and analytics efforts (here and here), and a few that were less so (here and here). Recently, I’ve thought about the differences between the successful and the unsuccessful.

As I see it, there are five general characteristics that the successful endeavors share. They: 

  • Closely Align with the Business
  • Share an End State Vision
  • Are Reality Grounded
  • Have a Technically Competent Team
  • Feature Frequent and Open Communications

To level set, this article focuses on business-facing analytics, data acquisition, application development, and related efforts developing internal capabilities for larger organizations. Continue reading

The Myth of Agile Sign-Off

Although Agile writers and thinkers agree that “there is no sign-off” in Agile methodology, the practice of requiring product owners and business customers to sign off on requirements and delivered work products persists in Agile settings. I’ve seen it most when an agile team faces delivery challenges and leaders perceive the problem is scope creep or failure of the UAT process before delivery. In those situations, adding a formal sign-off provides an illusion of a stronger process but does nothing to resolve the underlying issue.

Sure, sometimes sign-off is necessary, especially when two or more separate organizations work together on a project. For example, consulting contracts often require sign-off on interim and final work products. However, addition of a sign-off step is common within organizations in hopes of a remedy for delivery or quality challenges.

The commenter David on this post says that “the purpose of a sign-off (or whatever you wanna call it) is a confirmation from a product owner that artifact A is fine for the time being, and can be used as basis for work on artifact B.” That’s all well and good, but in a well-run Agile context sign-off is a meaningless formality that’s dispensed with because it’s unnecessary.

How could that be? Others have written, often emphatically, on why sign-off is unnecessary in an agile context, including here and here. This quick video explains how “definition of done” and a fully committed, reliable team work together together make sign-off irrelevant. Continue reading

Toward a Values-Based Approach to Auditing Agile Projects

By now Agile has taken over waterfall as the dominant app dev project pattern*. In many large organizations, the traditional waterfall PMO also owns Agile projects. One aspect of PMO oversight that can work against Agile culture is the project audit. If the goal of an audit is to ensure the project reflects Agile values, it can help ensure working software and a satisfied customer. If not, an Agile project audit can reinforce process, documentation, and other values that don’t directly promote project success.

In this post I’ll briefly review the Agile Manifesto, recount some prominent advice for auditors of Agile projects, and offer suggestions for auditors who want to reinforce rather than suppress Agile values. Continue reading

Values and Behaviors of the Successful Agilist

Of course, any discussion of Agile values starts with the Agile Manifesto. The first sentence declares that Agile development is about seeking better ways and helping others. Then, as if espousing self-evident truths, the founders present four relative value statements. Finally, they emphasize appropriate balance, saying that the relatively less valued items aren’t worthless: implying that they are to be maintained inasmuch as they support the relatively more valued items.

While there is value in the four relative value statements, I believe most successful Agilists value the first and last statements more. So to me, the core Agile values are continuous improvement, helping others, and balance.

There’s a lot written about Agile behaviors, but as I read most is geared toward scrummasters or managers, and most is about transitioning from the waterfall world. Starting from the premise that Agile methods are established, focusing on participants rather than managers, and based on the assumption that behaviors are grounded in values, this post details the values and behaviors I’ve observed of those who succeed as Agile team members.

Continue reading

Analytics Requirements: Avoid a Y2.xK Crisis

Even though it happens annually, teams building new visualizations often forget to think about the effects of turning over from one year to another.

In today’s fast paced, Agile world, requirements for even the most critical dashboards and visualizations tend to evolve, and development often proceeds iteratively from a scratchpad sketch through successively more detailed versions to release of a “1.0” production version. Organized analytics teams evolve dashboards within a process framework that include checkpoints ensuring standards are met for security, reliability, usability, and so on.

A reporting team can build a revolutionary analytics capability enabling unprecedented visibility into operations, and then, if year turnover isn’t included in requirements, experience embarrassing errors and usability challenges in the January after initial deployment. In effect, the system experiences its own Y2.xK crisis, not too different from the expected Y2K crisis 16 years ago. Continue reading

Protect Your Culture: Screening for authoritarian project leaders

Bugs BunnyIt’s fashionable today to talk about the risks of authoritarianism in the political sphere. I’m not going to speculate on that, but such talk got me thinking about the same tendencies among IT project leaders. What is an authoritarian personality? (Yes, that’s actually a thing.) Is it truly antithetical to a healthy project? If so, how can you screen for it in hiring?

Recently, ArsTechnica ran an article that offers a survey of research on authoritarian personalities conducted since the 1940s. The bottom line for us is that those with authoritarian tendencies more often Continue reading

More on the Agile Architect: Process and Knowledge Transfer

webscrum_2444372bI’ve written about groupthink-related quality challenges on Agile projects, and the architect’s role in preventing groupthink from degrading quality. I’ve seen other risks related to the cohesion and potential insularity of successful Agile teams, and the architect is also well positioned to help prevent these: a tendency to neglect setting up and documenting repeatable processes, and a similar tendency not to share of knowledge and lessons learned outside the Agile team. Continue reading

No More Enterprise Data Sinks – An Agile Data Warehousing Manifesto

SinkOver the past year I’ve reviewed what seem like countless plans for enterprise data warehouses. The plans address real problems in the organizations involved: the organization needs better data to recognize trends and react faster to opportunities and challenges; business measures and analyses are unavailable because data in source systems is inconsistent, incomplete, erroneous, or contains current values but no history; and so on.

The plans detail source system data and its integration into a central data hub. But the ones I’m referring to don’t tell how the data will be delivered, or portray a specific vision of how the data is to drive business value. Instead, their business case rests on what I’ll call the “railroad hypothesis”. No one could have predicted how the railroads enabled development of the West, so the improved data infrastructure will create order of magnitude improvements in ability to access, share, and utilize data, from which order of magnitude business benefits will follow.* All too often these plans just build bridges to nowhere. Continue reading

Assumptions: A Key to Technical Leadership

DonkeyThere’s an unfortunate and rather rude saying about assumptions that I’ve found popular among IT folks I’ve worked with. I say unfortunate because, to me, assumptions that are recognized early and handled the right way are a key to successful projects. Technical players who use assumptions well can help set projects on the right path long before they go astray.

Sometimes on waterfall and hybrid projects technical players are asked to estimate work early, before requirements are complete. My instinctive reaction is not to provide an ungrounded estimate, but that’s not helpful. The way to handle this uncomfortable uncertainty is to fill out the unknowns with assumptions: detailed, realistic statements that provide grounding for your estimate. Continue reading

Get Business Requirements Right by Resolving Many-to-Manys

Logical data modeling is one of my tools of choice in business analysis and requirements definition. That’s not particularly unusual – the BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) recognizes the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) as a business analysis tool, and for many organizations it’s a non-optional part of requirements document templates.

In practice, however, data models in requirements packages often include many-to-many relationships. I’ve heard experienced data modelers advocate this practice, and it unfortunately seems consistent with the “just enough, just in time” approach associated with agile culture.

In my experience unresolved M:M relationships indicate equally unresolved business questions. The result: schedule delays and budget overruns as missed requirements are built back in to the design, or the familiar “that’s not what we wanted” reaction during User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Continue reading