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© IAG Consulting 2011
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Harmonizing Agility & Discipline
Balancing Warring Methodologies
and Achieving Success
Keith Ellis
Sr. Vice President
IAG Consulting
1-800-209-3616
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What Are We Going to Talk About?
• Improving satisfaction with development effort
• I‟m likely going to annoy method purists
• Complex organizations – How does this stuff work in
real life? What‟s good, what‟s not going to work?
• Positive actions: Steps that can be taken to effect
outcome
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About IAG:
14 Years of living requirements excellence:
• Completed over 1,200 requirements projects
• Worked with over 300 of the Fortune 500 companies
• Trains over 1,200 business analysts annually
• Somewhat in excess of 700 clients using our methods
• 50 staff members all 100% focused on excellence in business
requirements
• Annually invested 10% of our revenue in developing our methods,
processes and techniques to assure that these are harmonized and
industry best practices
http://programs.rational.com/partner/SearchResults_Company.cfm?CMP=1903
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Learning Objectives
1. Look at the structure of agility and discipline-based
methods
2. Provide guidelines for adding agile practices to
traditional software development environments
3. Provide guidelines for reapplying traditional
development practices to the agile software
development environment.
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Let‟s See Who We‟re Talking with
• What statement do you most agree with:
• Agile is the new world – get with the program
• We change our methods on every project
• We‟ve got very strict standards for requirements
documentation and project planning
• There are lots of emerging ways to do requirements
(other than agile or plan driven) we‟re experimenting
with
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Facts and Misconceptions
• „Waterfall‟ was developed as a
reaction to „code-and-fix‟, the
prevalent method at the time
• Royce (1970) included as
elements in waterfall:
• Iteration & evolutionary
development
• Prototyping (as much as 1/3 of
project effort)
• Concept of SCRUM was first
introduced in 1986 as a form of
„Iterative development‟
• Agile (in SCRUM/XP/FDD form)
rigidly controls:
• Pre-game planning & staging”
• Sprint planning
• Sprints
• Stakeholder participation (Scrum
meetings)
• Use cases are promoted in many
variants of agile despite user
stories being the standard
Agile Manifesto was published in 2001
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What is Everyone Trying To Do?
• Produce working software
• Get productive use of resources
• Prioritize and build what is needed
• Build it efficiently and with transparency
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Visualize the Development Process
Input Output
Supplier
Customer
Process(What information
do you need?)
…. The answer is “POLARIZING”
Manufacturing-
like efficiency
Maximize task
efficiency
Clockwork-like
releases of new stuff
Maximize solution usability
What do you most value in completing the process?
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Agile Manifesto
Through this work we have come to value:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive
documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
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Methods Align Within This Value Framework
InputManufacturing-
like efficiency
OutputClockwork-like releases
of new stuff
SupplierMaximize task efficiency
CustomerMaximize solution usability
Oracle: Oracle AIMSAP: ASAP
Waterfall
DoD
Spiral
Mashups
Visualization-based methods
V-Model
Agile
XP
SCRUM
RAD
CMMI
DSDM (Dynamic Systems Development Method)
FDD(Feature Driven Development)
RUP
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The Missing Link: Refocus on Success as
the Primary Goal
Cross-Organizational Satisfaction
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Satisfaction Focus Harmonizes
Methodologies
Cross-Organizational Satisfaction
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Messages to Repeat(Over and Over and Over…)
• It‟s all a single spectrum of methodologies trying
to achieve the same goal
• Being rigid in the application of the value system
behind a method leads to polarization
• Polarization reduces effectiveness
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HARMONIZING AGILITY AND
DISCIPLINE
Increasing Satisfaction with your Current Environment
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Five Issues You Must Wrestle With to
Increase Satisfaction
• Job Roles: Scope of competency required to have effective employees
versus a span of responsibility to get motivated employees
• Efficient Customer Participation: How effective is the approach to
elicitation?
• Scalability and Process Repeatability: How do you deal with
VOLUME?
• Institutionalizing Success: Are all projects an exception?
• Objective Success: How do you KNOW your customer got (is getting)
what they wanted?
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Tuning the Implementation of a Specific Framework
Strengths of Input/Plan
Driven Approaches
• Better capturing of
context and
interdependencies
• Reusability of models &
documentation
• Capture of non-functional
requirements
Strengths of Agile/Output
Driven Approaches
• Ease of integrating
change
• Demonstrating value
repeatedly/faster release
cycles
• Customer participation
“by design”
Harmonizing: Creating synergy by bringing together elements of both.
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APPLYING AGILE PRINCIPLES
TO PLAN-DRIVEN
APPROACHES
1. Embrace and manage change
2. Demonstrate value repeatedly/Faster release cycles
3. Customer participation “by design”
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Embrace & Manage Change
Systems Specification
Requirements Specification
Business Requirements
Document
Business Requirements
Document
Requirements Specification
System Specification
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Demonstrate Value Repeatedly/Faster Delivery
Cycles
• How long does it
take you to organize
big projects?
(>$5M to $10M)
• How long does it
take to break it into
meaningful pieces?
Issue with Plan-driven
approaches
Adopting agilist multiple
release approach
• F100 food and beverage
manufacturer – overhaul to all
supply side systems – break
into 12 projects in 2 weeks.
• F500 manufacturer - Global
ERP – break into digestible
projects in 3 weeks.
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Customer Participation By Design
• We can‟t get sufficient time
with the stakeholders…
• We have trouble getting
sign-off on requirements
• We can only access
subject experts for an hour
or so at a time.
Anyone have
these problems?
• Requirements plan:
• Here‟s what your
participation needs to
be…
• Here‟s when you need to
participate
• Here‟s how we‟ll
participate
Adopting agilist
“customer in the kitchen”
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APPLYING PLAN-DRIVEN
PRINCIPLES TO AGILE
APPROACHES
1. Define Requirements in Context
2. Use Models to Communicate
3. Plan to Capture Non-functional Requirements
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Define Requirements in Context
What we implemented:1. ALWAYS have a user
acceptance test on a user
story
2. Use Cases augment user
stories with context and
help sequence
3. Build a master context
diagram for the system:
1. Where is each feature
hitting?
2. How?
Backlog of 800 stories…
Sufficient clarity to
know magnitude (?)
Sequence?
1
2
34
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
? ?
?
?
?
!!!
!!!
!!!
!!!
Risk to architecture or have cross functional impact (!!!)
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Use Models to Communicate
• Losing control of
system changes
• Point activities
were not in
context for
stakeholders
What we implemented:• Technology – MDD
• Single center of truth for the
system
• Models and Development are
simultaneous
To do effectively:
• CUSTOMIZE package
produce models that are
meaningful for stakeholders
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Plan to Capture Non-Functional
Requirements
1. Create artificial user stories – add to the
stack delivered in a sprint
2. Augment user story cards with listing of
non-functional requirements and
constraints/Create a different artifact.
3. Strengthen standards (SLA) and style
guide: Report exceptions on user stories
Company needs to:
• Strengthen testing approach
• Train devs to ask FURPS
Company has a choice in
implementation:“Am I allowed to capture non
functional requirements?”
“They didn’t tell me about
that issue”
IN AGILE THE DEV TEAM IS
ACCOUNTABLE FOR ALL
REQUIREMENTS:
•Must get right
•Must intuit non-functionals
•Relies heavily on judgment
& experience
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Closing Thoughts: Four Critical Concepts
• It‟s all a single spectrum of methodologies trying to
achieve the same goal
• Focus on cross-organizational satisfaction to enhance
method performance
• No matter what you select, there are five central issues
that will impact your success
• Simple changes can make for significant performance
improvement
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Learning Objectives
1. Look at the structure of agility and discipline-based
methods
2. Provide guidelines for adding agile practices to
traditional software development environments
3. Provide guidelines for reapplying traditional
development practices to the agile software
development environment.
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Who is IAG Consulting?
• We are solely focused on business and software requirements discovery and management
• Core Competency: Elicitation
• A deliverable from IAG is:Clear, Accurate and Complete
• Work with clients in 4 modes:• Requirements Discovery and Management
• Analyst Professional Development
• Best Practices Implementation
• Turn-key Center of Excellence
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Thanks
Keith Ellis
Sr. Vice President
IAG Consulting
1-800-209-3616
Project Management Institute PDU Submission Information
Webinar Name: Harmonizing Agility & Discipline
Total PDU's : 1.0
PDU Program Reference Number: IAG808
PMI Registered Education Provider: IAG Consulting
PMI Registered Education Provider Number: 2858