My experience with Service Design!
Written by Alex Mihai
I am going to put my hands up and admit it! I had no idea what agile was when I started working in this way. I remember in my first week my brain just exploded in trying to take everything in. And, not to mention that all sorts of lingo was thrown at me. Things like iterate or discovery or solutionise meant nothing to me. Information overload is an understatement! Thank God I had my team around me.
But then, I started getting more and more involved into different projects and it all made complete sense. It was like all of the pieces of the puzzle were suddenly falling into place. And then the world of agile didn’t seem as terrifying. There are many opinions out there about agile. Here are mine.
1. How important is planning to a successful agile project?
Detailed upfront planning isn’t a critical success factor for agile projects. Embracing change is a critical success factor. Have a vision, understand the scale of the project, and then jump in. It’s a mistake to try to estimate the project at a granular level up front. In fact, one of the biggest mistakes people make is to plan too much up front.
2. How important is communication to a successful agile initiative?
Communication is a very important aspect of agile. Because things move on at a much faster pace, having a traditional communications plan is not going to work. You will find yourself spending too long in updating the plan and losing key messages. Agile communication differs slightly from communication in traditional projects. Communication, in project management terms, is the formal and informal ways the people on the project team convey information to each other. As with traditional projects, good communication is a necessity for agile projects. However, the agile principles set a different tone for agile communication. This is emphasising simplicity, directness, flexibility and face-to-face conversations. This where the stand ups, show and tells and lunch and learns come into play.
3. What should be taken into consideration when setting a project’s scope?
That you don’t know what you don’t know. You will be wrong. Scope will change. Never fix scope. Have a rough sense of the most important features, and meet regularly to assess priorities and any challenges that the project might face.
4. What is the role of user feedback in successful agile project?
Users are the key element of each project. Yet, as Ford said, “If we asked customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse” User input is critical. It also needs to be balanced with the vision. You don’t want to overreact to any single user, yet without a group of users that need your service, you have no viable service.
5. How important is testing to agile project success?
Testing is a key agile process. Yet, testing is valuable based on the life cycle phase of a project. If you are spiking an idea to see if it’s worth building, and you are going to throw away that initial code, no need to test every last little thing. If you are building a foundation of code upon which years of additional code will rely, then testing is critical. Think of testing as a safety net. If I jump off 1 step, I don’t need a net. If I jump off of the Empire State Building, I’m going to want a strong net. The bigger the risk of the fall, the more important the tests.
