Joshua RenderProduct Owner| CognizantHarrisville, Ny, United States
I transitioned to a new job recently. How I did things before is I created general plans for when we (the team) wanted/hoped/expected to work on things and get them done. We then elaborated on the general items to get the steps needed to complete the larger general task.
The new position is not really agile as in incremental development. They make attempts at carrying over some agile practices - like progressive elaboration under a different name. In my new position, I was instructed to create refined goals based on the expected schedule. That actually confused me at first. I thought the schedule was basically our set of goals. It took me three days to figure they meant elaboration of the general task item.
So if our schedule says to get 1 server up and running - we elaborate that out as we approach the start date. They called this goal setting. I thought it was an interesting view of what we were doing as I always viewed the larger task as the goal, the elaborated items as the means or steps to get there.
Essentially it is the exact same thing (stripped down for simplicity) - without the "Progressive Elaboration" name applied to it. We have the same general scope of what is going to happen and we still go through an elaboration process, but we approach it from the point of view of these are the goals we have to meet to get this whole task completed. I am not sure I like this view of it, but it is all semantics I suppose.
Is this common? I have never heard of it approached this way. Anyone else experience a different sort of way to view it? Saving Changes...
That is an interesting nomenclature, Joshua. I've also experienced goals as being the final target and the steps to get there worked out through progressive elaboration as being the plans and activities.
I have worked on projects which have a phase by phase approach, the concept is similar to the way you have stated. The schedule is divided into phases, requirements are grouped into phases and they become part of a release. When all the phases and releases complete, the project is believed to be complete. Saving Changes...
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