Sep 21st, 2020
End to End Delivery
Part 5: Goals for All Delivery
Written by: Craig Vosper, Chief Delivery Officer
Over the past few weeks, we have been talking about what pieces of information our customers require for project success. To summarize, these include:
- Timeline
- Cost
- Business Value
- Quality
We’ve spent a few weeks talking through our analysis process and how we provide answers to items 1-3 above. It may seem like a long drawn out process, but it’s typically done within a 2-week sprint for any new project and completed in just 1 day for new opportunities. The key is to ensure that regardless of how quickly it gets done, we produce a clear plan for our teams to work from.
So now that we have this plan, I wanted to talk through the four vital tenets we use when executing against the plan. Today, Ill introduce the basic intent of each.
React to Change – In all projects you will come across changes that you may or may not decide to make. The key is that you need to be able to discuss how the changes impact a project’s priorities, scope, schedule, and cost. Its impossible to make a good decision on any new project request without this information. These discussions require a high level of trust and transparency with your customer to be successful.
Deliver Value Sooner – Development teams cannot deliver features sooner unless they are defined and decomposed in a way for them to do so! One way to do this is to break down your requirements into Minimal Viable Products (MVP) or Minimal Marketable Features (MMFs) (we’ll talk more about that in a couple of weeks). These help you and your business partners agree on what each release will do for the business. Too often we focus on how to deliver everything vs focusing on the most important things first!
Become Predictable – While we want to react to change, we want to be predictable in what we can deliver. This means being able to tell the customer what they will get and when they will get it. Without this, its nearly impossible to understand the impact a change may have to the plan.
Ensure High-Quality Work – High quality means not only the solution works as designed but it meets the customers needs as well. This means that each story is completed based on well-defined acceptance criteria and that the customer agrees that you met them! We often will use a concept called Minimal Testable Features (which I wrote about earlier) to aid with this.
Over the next four weeks Ill talk through more of the details for how we work to meet these high-level delivery goals on every project.