Motivation for Agile Practices
My motivation for using Agile practices is to foster accomplishments and build high-performance teams, ones which are self organizing. I first started using Agile practices around 2000, when I was working as a consultant at NASA Ames Research Center. I had been working there since 1994 in various roles, being handed off from one consulting company to the next as the contract term for the consultant company expired. If you had worked in a government agency of one sort or another during this time, you will have experienced what I had – essentially by July/August time frame budget on any project other then the favorite project(s) has been exhausted and you are in a limbo not knowing whether you have a job to come to from one week to the next. The situation is made worse by the fact that part of your team, being civil servants, does not have same concerns as even though the project has truly exhausted a budget they are special.
It was under these conditions and being exhausted by the daily grind of team discussions on whether we have new budget (if possible raided from another project) or are we to look for opportunities outside that I proposed the following
- we meet daily as a team
- take that time to define a set of prioritized features
- define some simple use cases and acceptance criteria
Once we had a prioritized list, we opened up the list to other teams on whom we relied on to provide the systems interface. Our program and product management were wowed by this, as not only did we specify the features but score rank these based on a need or a want and has specified a probability/impact metric. We met daily as a team to define on the product feature list and once this was defined we met every other day in the course of fulfilling the development of the prioritized features. After a few weeks went by we decided to demo what was developed, mocking up elements that were not yet developed as they were lower down the priority. As we discovered strong participation from stakeholders, especially during demo days, we instituted a demo day every 2 weeks and opening this up to end customer every 4 weeks – this was so we could get their input first hand.
In essence we made these decisions to save anyone going bonkers, as well as saving the embarrassment felt by some of the civil servants on the team at our situation. You see, some of them were not so long ago consultants themselves and couple of them were recruited straight from college and were junior team members when compared to experienced consultants who had already worked 7-10 years across many projects within the agency.
