Agile Analysis: facilitating result-driven workshops

Presenter: Joke Vandemaele

Objectives: What is the most effective way to kick-start an ICT project? What is the minimum amount of analysis up front necessary to reach a common understanding of project goals, scope, cost and duration between Business and ICT? Power workshops seem to answer the above questions.

Intended audience: Business Analysts are adapting to Agile Development practices, they need to reduce waste and optimize lead time of the analysis phase. The workshop becomes the analyst’s tool, it is the analyst responsibility to organize the workshops, invite and facilitate discussions between participants and to capture the minimum amount of information to kick start a project

Product Owners, Agile Project Managers, Developers and Testers all have a key role in these workshops, since the presence of different skills is necessary for the Business Analyst to get to the right results.

Contents Agile Analysis workshops are based on the principles of teamwork, cooperative exploration and discovery of knowledge, and visual representation of information.

Their goal is to elicit and capture the requirements necessary to start a project while reducing waste and optimizing lead time.

The result is a strong visual representation of vivid conversations, held between business and IT, expressing the common goal. It is built for mutual understanding, to show commitment and uncover any hidden doubts or uncertainties. The memory of this image is stronger than a 1000 written words

Learning outcomes:

  • How to plan your analysis stage in the most effective way to kick start an IT project
  • Know what is the minimum amount of up front analysis necessary to reach a common understanding of project goals, scope, cost and duration between Business and IT
  • How to prepare for an agile power workshop
  • Facilitate an agile power workshop and elicit requirements
  • Capture information from the workshop into a Product Backlog with Stories which can then be used for agile development, and if necessary for creating a contract, RFP or other
  • Estimate, prioritize the stories in the Product Backlog and define the release plan for the project
  • Present the results of your analysis to management
  • You will also get an idea of the time line, budget, and who to involve during this analysis stage.
Some pointers: This session was presented at XP Days Benelux as a last-minute replacement for a presenter who dropped out. This session has also been enrolled for the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago and the XP 2009 Conference in Sardinia, Italy.

Format and length: 60 minutes Tutorial

  • This session is a tutorial in which, by use of a presentation of a real project (a slide show with pictures,) the organization and facilitating of result-driven workshops is explained step by step.
  • During the tutorial a time line with each of these steps to take, who to involve at each stage and how much time it will take, will be drawn on a white board.
  • Materials like a product backlog, testimonials, contracts and more will be circulated through the room.
  • At the end of the tutorial extra slides specifying procedure and hints will be distributed to the participants.