My main purpose for this BLOG was to try and share some personal Agile Experience Reports and get discussions going with others on what worked and what didn’t work. My first challenge was to create a framework where some sense could be made of my personal project results.
When I compiled the list of Agile practices that I feel are important to projects, I was worried about how any patterns could emerge with that many factors. And I was right. I had compiled a list of 42 characteristics and practices that covered the Project Team, Project Planning, Execution, Requirement Gathering, and Development activities on the project.
What I did next was look at those 42 characteristics and practices and whittle it down to 5-10 Agile practices that I believe are really key to project success. Unfortunately, I could not get it below 12. So I was stuck with the Agile Dozen.
Next was the step to validate that those practices were indeed a true indication of project success. And through the projects reviewed so far, they have held.
For my upcoming Agile Experience Reports I’ll share how well we followed all 42 characteristics and practices on a rating scale of 1-5. But I want to caution that I am not viewing this rating as:
- An Agile scorecard
- An Agile Maturity
- An Agile report card
I think those constructs cause teams to focus on the wrong things. Namely, getting a good grade rather than project success, client success, and continuous improvement. I created this framework to help myself understand what practices really contributed most to project and client success and help me to improve and focus on the right practices.
In the next BLOG post I’ll discuss in details the Agile Dozen and my rationale for including them. For now, here is the list of the Agile Dozen..
- Team Experience (Technical & Domain)
- Developer to Designer Ratio
- Embedded Engaged Client
- Team Continuity
- Team Estimating
- Automated Tests
- Team meeting estimates
- Daily stand ups
- Retrospectives
- Iterative Delivery
- Epics, User Stories and Product Backlog
- Continuous Integration
Then I’ll provide some context on where these characteristics existed and practices actually worked on projects and share lessons learned.
I hope you will find this interesting. I tried to find information like this when I was starting out and I could not find it very easily.
Agile PMO 