3 Ways to Create Resilience in Your Agile Project

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

When we use a traditional dictionary definition of resilience, we think of bouncing “back” to some known state. However, I find that definition too restrictive. I rarely want a project to bounce “back.” Instead, especially with an agile approach, I might want the project to move to a different state altogether. When I do that, I can learn to deliver value to the customer, with different options.

In fact, for the most resilience in an agile project, I often start with how quickly the team learns.

1. Increase Team Learning Speed
Many managers think an agile approach is best for delivering some value early. They are correct. However, value might take several forms. Often, the value is in some form of learning.

For example, if the team releases to a customer, the team might learn from customer feedback. Or, the releasing might decrease the risk of future work, regardless of whether the team received feedback. Or the team might perform a spike or experiment to learn within the team.

Each of these possibilities shows how much the team needs to learn together. You can measure learning time with cycle time. (See 3 Agile Estimation Alternatives to see how to visualize and measure cycle time.)

Many teams learn about the product and the customer expectations as they build the product. That’s why decreasing learning time helps the team.

What…

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.