Agile methods typically don’t cover the early stages of projects very well. They often assume you are ready to start gathering requirements as user stories, or that you even have some candidate features or stories magically ready to go. This is shown by the scope coverage diagram below.
 

 
 

Yet for all but the smallest, most process-light organizations, there are stages of envisioning, feasibility, and setup that happen before we are ready to jump into requirements gathering. This is where many companies come unstuck with agile. Either they jump straight to stories and miss out the early project stuff and suffer disoriented stakeholders and disengaged project offices. Or they go too heavy with the upfront chartering and scope definition, create brittle plans and lose some of the advantages of adaptation and iterative development.

The following diagram is a good place to consider starting from. It combines some of the bare necessities from a traditional approach that will satisfy the project office. Yet it does not go too far into Big Design Up Front (BDUF) to create problems or consume too much time that could be better spent working directly with the business to determine their requirements via collaborative development.

 
 

The overall duration is short, just 15% of the likely (guestimated) project duration, but yields lightweight versions of the key deliverables familiar to the PMI process police. We get stakeholders informed and engaged, the project office placated, and the bulk of the project duration dedicated to iterative development. 

Instead of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) I would recommend a candidate prioritised Feature List or prioritised Story list.

 

Kick-Off meetings using the Design The Product Box exercise, or Shape the Poduct Tree are a great way to start identifying candidate features and then follow them up with Feature Discovery Workshops. The length and number of feature workshops will vary depending on the size and complexity of your project. A three month web project with a team of three people might be scoped in a day or two. Yet a three year project with 30 people will take longer to drive out all the candidate features.

I am actually quite a fan of the early project deliverables like Project Charters since they explain important W5+ (What, Why, When, Who, Where + How) elements of a project, but believe these documents don’t have to be verbose or costly to create.

Instead cover the basics, get people onside and the whole endeavour will go quicker than if you try to start without these things and have to catch people up later.

This article summarizes my “Lessons Learned in Project Metrics: Are your Metrics Dumb or Smart?” presentation. It covers the following six topics

 

2010 is shaping up to be a good year for training courses and events. I have the following public enrolment courses available through the PMI.


March 10-11 Anaheim, CA

April 13-14 Scottsdale, AZ

September 15-16 Las Vegas, NV

November 10-11 Scottsdale, AZ

December 15-16 San Diego, CA

 
My private courses are available year round, see here for a list and course outlines, and I am also hoping to head back to Alaska this summer to teach a class for the PMI Alaska Chapter there again.

As normal I’m keeping the bulk of the summer free to take full advantage of the short, but fantastic hiking and mountain biking season we get here around Calgary. I was hoping to attend the Agile 2010 Conference in Nashville, but the dates August 9-13 clash with the TransRockies Mountain Bike Race August 8-14 that comes right through my backyard of Kananaskis and is too good to pass up.

Instead of the Nashville agile conference, I hope to attend another agile conference in the fall, perhaps the Agile Business Conference in England again, or a Scrum Gathering event. Then of course there is the PMI Global Congress conference in Washington, DC in October. With the PMI Agile Community of Practice now the largest PMI community with >1700 members there will be a large Agile contingent attending and many great agile sessions to go to. Once again so many events and so little time!