The Agile Initiative Inception
Do you remember the kick-off day for the initiative you’re currently involved in?
What about those first meetings where everyone was super excited and in agreement?
That general positivity spreading throughout the room, that shiny, new-thing-to-develop feeling. How awesome was that, right?
Now, take a step back and look where you are today. Do you still feel the same way?
Yes? No?
There's a good chance you're not feeling great — dealing with struggles, deadlines, misunderstandings, and misalignment. Sound familiar?
Well, that happens a lot. I'd even say every time. And there's a reason for that: you, your teammates, your Product Owner, your Engineering Manager, and even all the stakeholders are different people, each with their own perspectives, experiences, and ideas about what to develop.
You, your teammates, your Product Owner, your Engineering Manager, and even all the stakeholders are different people.
You're not aligned with each other, conceptually.
It's not about you or the Team Lead failing to make things clear. The reason is simple: without proper common ground rules and fundamental processes, this is what happens on big projects.
You're not able to plan a big strategy all at once, and sometimes you can't even predict what you'll deliver by the end of the day—and that's human nature, which is fine! The truth is, it's all about planning and alignment.
The truth is: it's all about planning and alignment.
The human brain is capable of processing 20 million billion bits of information per second using just 20 Watts on average. That's astonishingly fast! But that only works for simple, everyday activities.
So, is there anything we can do to improve planing? Wouldn't it be great to have a better grasp of what's really going on when developing a new feature?
I believe so, and I think Agile practices, especially the Scrum methodology, can be a powerful tool to help with that.
But wait, isn't Agile about small deliverables and steady progress without worrying too much about the big picture? In part, yes, but it's also about great communication, better understanding, forecasting, and collaboration.
Welcome to the Agile Initiative Inception
The sole purpose of running an Agile Initiative Inception session is to ensure that everyone is aligned and understands the initiative. That's it: nothing more, nothing less!
Everyone is aligned and understands the initiative
Shift your mindset
To successfully run an Agile Initiative Inception, you first need to change how you, your team, and everyone involved think about the importance of finding common ground.
The following image is a great way to represent what we're aiming for:
Picture borrowed from Agile Warrior
One way to achieve this is to involve all participants from the very beginning, even before the session, and to clearly define your problem first.
If you don't know each other well, grab a coffee together, share your ideas, and ask for their feedback.
Start from the beginning
Sit everyone together, define a social contract regarding equipment you can use and how to leave the room without interruption, breaks, etc.
Start by presenting an Agenda and outlining the expectations for the session. Here's an example:
- Understand the initiative motivations
- Find your common ground and align on the goals
- Raise questions, clear up doubts, and close any unresolved issues
- Assess risks, impediments and dependencies
- Discover the direction: what's in scope and what's out of scope
- Determine the next steps and create action points
Start with a “Why?”
Duration: 10 minutes
The goal here is to define a vision for the project, which means you can boil it down to a single sentence.
Everyone involved needs to understand who the stakeholders are and the reason behind the initiative.
Scope, out of scope, unresolved
Duration: 30-90 minutes
Once the vision is clear, move on to the next step: writing down what's in scope and what's not on a big whiteboard or using post-its.
After this step, you'll have a clearer idea of what you want to tackle and what's out of scope.
After running this step, you'll come with some barriers about what you want to tackle and what is out of the scope.
Meet your neighbors
Duration: 30-60 minutes
Now it's time to identify dependencies or points of contact. For each item/topic in scope, determine which teams need to be involved and what external dependencies need to be resolved.
Remember, this is just a high-level overview. The details for each item/topic should be aligned in separate sessions, like a User Story Mapping.
Show your solution
Duration: 60-90 minutes
Using the big whiteboard, rearrange your scope and draw your boxes together with the team, adding some technical details (but nothing too elaborate).
Divide the team into small task groups and sketch out architectural diagrams, considering:
- Existing ecosystem components that might be affected
- Describe what needs to change
- Understand the implications of those changes
- Drive the discussion to a clear outcome
Optionally, you can present each part of the architectural diagram and ensure everyone understands what role each component plays in the existing ecosystem.
What keeps us up at night?
Duration: 30-60 minutes
One thing we often forget is to assess the risks we might face in the short and long term throughout the initiative's lifecycle — from development to general availability.
Start by mapping the risks and discussing each one to determine if they're worth tackling or not — be conservative here. Limit each topic to about 10 minutes of discussion.
Lastly, revisit the Unresolved ideas and discuss them just like you did with the ones in scope.
If you can't reach an agreement, place that item in a Parking Lot for further discussion in a different forum and move on to the next topic.
User Story Mapping
Now, with all the groundwork laid, you're ready to run one or more User Story Mapping sessions. The product scope is clear, and everyone is ready to dive deep into the user journeys.
Conclusions
The methodology described here is a high-level framework to involve everyone during the product design phase. Whenever you feel the need to find common ground, this is the approach to take.
I believe this tool can help teams define the vision, scope, and requirements of an initiative for the next steps and resolve some of the inconsistencies and miscommunication that often arise during development.
If you find this useful or have already used this in your team, please leave a comment below. Share your feedback so others can benefit from it!
Featured image by Max Andrey