Tag Archives: scope and requirements

Project scope and/or requirements

Build it in a Week

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I ran a massed prototyping exercise with my current team. The whole team: development, user experience and design, testing, product management, business analysis, programme/project management and the programme director. It was a concerted effort to get a solution covering everything. The idea was to build wide not deep. The requirements for the end to end workflow was a generic operating model we’d developed previously. Microsoft Sharepoint was the underlying platform so this exercise concentrated on “out-of-the-box” solutions based on Sharepoint.

Expected Benefits

I allocated a week for this so the cost was quite high. On the other hand I expected considerable benefits. I expected “Build it in a Week” to enable us to:

  • understand the requirements more
  • validate the generic operating model
  • validate the emerging information architecture
  • identify technical challenges and identify if “tricky” things were in fact simple
  • demo an end to end solution (even if clunky and with caveats)
  • understand Sharepoint 2010 more, specifically understand what “out-of-the-box” means in 2010
  • identify what we can’t do “out-of-the-box” right now
  • understand each other more

As programme manager I thought it worth the cost.
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Minimum Releasable Feature

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There are a variety of terms in use for chunks of functionality that are worth releasing and the requirements that describe them. Desirable characteristics for these features include being minimum, releasable, and valuable. At the moment I am using the phrase Minimum Releasable Feature (MRF) so I thought I’d explain why and some of the alternatives.
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Agile Project Estimating

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Estimates are an essential part of Agile Project Planning.  Software estimation has always been problematic and people have proposed many different ways to do estimating.  Different methods are on a spectrum from formal to informal and from supposedly objective to seemingly subjective.  Different methods also get individuals estimate or groups.  And some methods estimate size and derive effort while others estimate effort directly.  Estimating in the Agile world has settled a certain approach which might be characterised as expert group estimation of size. this article covers Traditional Project Estimation, Agile versus Traditional Estimating, Estimating User Stories, Estimating Tasks, Contingency, and Agile Ballpark Estimates.
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Agile Project Monitoring and Control

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No battle plan survives contact with the enemy

Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

Life is what happens to you
while you’re busy making other plans

John Lennon

Agile Project Planning tells us what we expect to do, but, to paraphrase the quotes above, plans often turn to custard. The job of the Agile Project Manager is to guide the team to successful delivery despite the challenges the world throws at the project. This article is about monitoring the project against the plan and intervening when we notice things going off track. In particular it covers Traditional Project Monitoring & Control, Agile versus Traditional Monitoring & Control, Agile Project control, Agile project metrics, Agile Project Reporting, and Agile Project Monitoring.
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Agile Change Management

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My background is running Agile projects for external customers in the context of a contract, often fixed price.  That influences my focus on good project management and specifically change management. Change Management is the mechanism to combat scope/feature creep.

Within the Agile world scope change is expected and time is considered more important than functionality. So if something has to give to allow change then functionality/scope loses and time wins. To do this the customer must make Requirements Trade-offs. The Customer directs development in Timebox and minor changes are just accepted. Big changes are handled different depending on whether it is a change to the Release Plan or Timebox Plan.
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Agile Project Planning

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No battle plan survives contact with the enemy

Plans are nothing, but planning is everything

Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke

I believe that Agile Project Management provides certainty of delivery. Planning is what lets us answer the question “When will you be finished?”. Planning is, however, just the start of the process. As Moltke pointed out planning is more important that the plan because once you start the project you’ll find the plan is wrong and you have to adapt. All plans need revisiting and you will have to use Agile Project Control, Agile Change Management, and Agile Risk Management to get the promised certainty of delivery.
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Agile Project Scope

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According to Wikipedia: Project Management project scope is:

The overall definition of what the project is supposed to accomplish, and a specific description of what the end result should be or accomplish.

We can talk about what is “in-scope”, i.e. what the project is meant to delivery, and what is “out-of-scope”, i.e. what won’t be delivered.

Typically the project scope is a subset of the scope of the product under development.
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Agile Project Initiation

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One company I worked with called the start of the project the “Blueprint” as it is about roughly shaping the project and product. “Inception” is another common term for this phase in agile projects. This article outlines traditional project initiation then delves into more detail on Agile Project Initiation.
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Agile Risk Management

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Risk management is about identifying, addressing, and eliminating sources of risk before they become a threat to the project. This article outlines traditional risk management, how Agile is a risk mitigation strategy, and how to do Agile risk management.
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One Page Agile Standard for team of 350

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For the last two years I have been rolling out a standard Agile approach to a department of 350. One part of the roll out strategy was to have a published standard. This was to make the goal / end-game obvious even if we didn’t initially mandate everything.

The first version of the standard, published Oct 2006, was a 50 page document. Earlier drafts had been quite short but in reviewing the document people kept asking “What does that mean?” so we’d add another section explaining it. All rather worthy but, aside from the initial reviews before publication, nobody read it. And it diluted the document as a standard, defining what must be done, as opposed to a guideline about how to do it.

We published version 2 today. This version of the standard is one page. I want to give people a simple checklist so they know whether or not they are following the standard.
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