20/08/2013

Transition in Agile Project Life Cycle

After some reading of "Lean  Startup" and "Scaled Agile Framework", I start to think about to add "Transition" as part of project life cycle into our projects. The problems that we have been experiencing are:


  • There is no feedback after projects delivered into production environment
  • Lots of team members treating deploying into production as end of life cycle
  • We have lots of features deployed into some of server for early access purpose, but there is no feedback loop into development team
  • Difference between business values expected to delivered and business values gained, no learning gain from that
From 2 months ago, I have setup portfolio board which outline projects and BAU items in project as a business and start to have in-transition as part of process. What is most important factor we are looking for
  • Mindset that project is only finished when stakeholders/customers gain values from it
  • Build learning culture across business about what we have failed and been succeeded 
  • Extend learning culture from Engineering team to other business departments
  • Early access program which bring a safe-net to delivery team 
  • Help support team and operation team preparing for production 

We are still working towards a better transition period. But most of feedback is positive and we will continue and make it better. There are few things that we have done along the way with feedback
  • Build rhythm for projects in transition too like setting up catchup every week
  • Setup specific page or websites as communicate tools between customers and business when projects in transition stage
  • Dedicated communication channels while projects are in transition to make sure problems solved as soon as possible so that business values can be delivered
  • Stories discovered in transition stage is always treated as highest priority
Please note transition is different from "harden" sprint in many ways. And if you are working towards continuous delivery, you should not have "harden" sprint at all.  At the transition stage, solution is delivered what it designed to do. But it may not fulfill customers' expectation fully or the solutions is deployed to test hypothesis. From transition, we need to learn something and business will grow with the stuff learn from it. 

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