Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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So...How’s That Agile Initiative Doing?
In my last gantthead article, Getting Started with Agile Delivery, I provided some guidelines to help you get up and running quickly with an agile adoption initiative. In this article, I’ll cover some ways for you to monitor the health of your agile initiative through regular process inspection and adaptation.
Background
Inspection and adaptation are built intrinsically into agile methodologies: Scrum, eXtreme Programming, DSDM, Feature Driven Development, etc., are all based on the iterative Shewart/Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) quality control cycle.
Since agile project delivery is iterative and incremental, every process iteration and every product increment provides opportunities to plan and deliver, and then inspect feedback from delivery. Finally, your process implementation can be adapted appropriately to meet the desired business outcomes of the project and or/ the business requirements of the product, and the PDCA process cycle can begin again. Here’s how to achieve this in both qualitative and quantitative ways.
Qualitative Inspection
You can inspect your agile process qualitatively through personal observation and project reflections.
Personal Observation
How do you tell from observation if your team is agile? Here are some of the distinguishing characteristics of agile teams (see my book Managing Agile Projects, Prentice Hall, 2005, for more) …
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