Application Architecture, Development & Integration

The first session I attended this morning is David Norton’s “How To Make Agile Waterfall“ (click link for slides).  He just put up a slide entitled: ”Waterfall Gives the Illusion of Seeing the Future – Accept the Winds of Change”.  To me this is one of the key points when it comes to the value of agile methodologies.  Let my digress for a moment…

I vividly remember the annual exercise, which many of you still go through, where the business folks show up at the beginning of the project approval process with a huge ”wish list” of projects they would like done.  I was always convinced that if I looked hard enough at the list, I would literally see the “kitchen sink” somewhere in the list.  Of course, there was no way that the development organization could tackle even half the list, so people would go through a prioritization exercise.  Then it would take months and months – if not years – to deliver the things the business folks had so desperately wanted.  All too often, when things were delivered, the business folks said that this wasn’t what they really wanted.  This would lead to people pulling up the requirements docs and debating whether what was delivered was what the business had asked for…

The point of David’s slide is that agile methods change this dynamic dramatically.  A few years ago, I talked with a client who gathered up the annual business ‘wish list’ just as they were switching to an agile method.  Interestingly, the kept the list.  As they deliverd incremental pieces of what the business wanted, conversations where held where the business said “ok, now that I see this piece of the puzzle…here is what we need to see next and these are changes that should be made to what you prototyped…”  After delivering in this way for 18 months, the development folks looked back at the business wish list.  Less than 20% of what was on the list turned out to be things that the business asked for over all the itrerations that had been done over the last 18 months.  There were also a number of things that business asked for over the iterations that were NOT on the original list.

What does this tell us?  As many of us already knew, the business often doesn’t REALLY KNOW what they want.  David just used the term “crystel ball gazing” as a way to think of how traditional project wish lists work.  Unless you have business people that are really good furtune tellers, you should seriously consider at least shortening waterfall cycles if not moving to a real agile method.  The big caveat is that whatever you choose has to be something that the business is willing to engage in, or it will all be for naught…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under Governance & Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.