wiki.accu.org

Back to 2014-proposals

Title:An Agile Project Startup Week
Proposer: Tom Gilb
Type: Case-Studies
Duration: 90 mins
Description:
Week: How to start any agile project in a single overview week, and get the basis for quick continuous measurable value delivery to customers and users, and other stakeholders.

Context: the startup week lays the essential groundwork for an agile project management process known as 'Evo'.

Day 1: Define the top ten most critical value improvements expected by this project, quantitatively on a single page.

Day 2: specify the top ten most powerful architecture or strategies for reaching your top ten project objectives on time.

Day 3: Evaluate the combined power of top architecture to reach the top objectives within budgets and deadlines. The impact estimation table (aka value delivery table) as a basic tool for determining the feasibility of meeting requirements within constraints: and for sensing risk levels and side effects.

Day 4: decomposition by value: finding initial value delivery steps for next and nearby weeks of attempts to deliver partial architecture and strategy, with a view to testing our ability to bring about real value improvement, or learn early of our limitations and lack of capability. Also the beginning of building or credibility, and communicating seriously with our stakeholders, and forcing our project team to recognize the whole system, not just the software alone.

Day 5. Getting management buy-in to diving in next week and starting to deliver real results. The irresistible proposition.

Case studies of doing this in practice, from UK (Citigroup), Norway (Confirmit), USA (Boeing, DoD) and other sources will be used throughout.

Why is a single week startup (feasibility study) sufficient to allow us to dive in and get results the next weeks? No matter project size (except perhaps the upper 5% most complex and large projects)