Better Than Tea Leaves

With an extensive background in health insurance and financial service companies, Brian's current focus is supporting teams as they adopt Agile and lean practices and deal with the challenges of organizational change. He is an expert helping foster better relations between business and technology to achieve more response projects and better results. He is one of the founding members of the PMI Agile Virtual Community of Practice and the creator of the annual Agile Games conference in Boston.

  Agile   Requirements Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Agile projects benefit from the rapid pace of feedback achieved through frequent releases, but what happens when you’re working on a complex project with a long timeline and resistance to releasing early? As a compensating strategy, story maps based on project goals can leverage some benefits of a release even if you aren’t “going live” any time soon.

When reviewing just about any text on Agile Software Development, you are bound to find a recommendation that your project release code frequently, at least every three months. The reasons for this are numerous: it’s the only completely honest accounting of progress, it helps and organization realize benefit from their investment, and it gets feedback from actual customers. These benefits are real and hard to dispute, but what happens when you are working in a domain that prevents you from launching on a regular basis?

Perhaps you are launching a complex application in a mature domain, or re-platforming an existing application for an established customer base. Creative teams may come up with some ways to break apart a release or identify pilot candidates. These avenues should always be exhausted before resigning to the “big release.” But sometimes, in spite of our best efforts, we find ourselves working on a project with a long timeline and massive barriers to launching it as a viable product any time …

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