Agile Product Development

Before implementing agile techniques, you may want to first evaluate their potential business benefits, and required changes to your existing organization, processes and product development roadmaps.

Our consulting service can help you assess your agile opportunity. Using our Agile Innovation Assessment scorecard and unique 9-Block Risk Model, we will benchmark your current innovation capabilities against agile best-practices. We then recommend an action plan to successfully adopt agile techniques, and identify your business case for change.

‘Agile’ alone is a project management methodology, and must still be combined with a gated development approach to manage project scope, risk and investment.

We provide 2, 3 and 5 stage agile + stage & gate hybrid project templates, for your incremental, major and new-to the-business product development initiatives.  Each template includes the best combination of stages, sprints per stage, deliverables, team members and gates for each of these project types. During implementation, we help you tailor these agile templates for your specific business needs and replace your existing traditional stage & gate templates.

The agile methodology delivers working, verifiable results within each sprint and stage of a project.  This work, known as agile ‘stories’, not only replace traditional stage & gate document templates, but also represent the actual product development, testing and market launch work that traditional stage & gate templates do not provide.

Each of our project templates includes a full set of standard deliverable ‘stories’, adapted from traditional stage & gate documents. Our templates also include standard stories for the typical product development, testing and market launch activities. The templates already assign these stories to the most appropriate stages and sprints and identify which team role is responsible for completing the work.

So now, your project teams have a comprehensive story set already defined when they first create a project, which they can then modify to fit the needs of their specific project.

In traditional stage & gate project management, project scope and product specifications are fixed early in the project, and any project change is tightly controlled. With agile, project teams explore alternate product definitions and adapt the work in each stage to optimize project value and reduce risk.

Our software enables project teams to easily add, delete or modify standard deliverables in a stage and add stories to a ‘backlog’, the to-do list of work not yet assigned to a particular sprint. Teams can then assign stories to sprints based the capacity of the team available for each sprint, and the priority and estimated effort of each story.

In traditional stage & gate, the team completes each gate deliverable at some point during the stage. With agile, work is more tightly tracked. Each is stage divided into a fixed number of  ‘sprints’, each typically two weeks long, and deliverable ‘stories’ assigned to sprints for the team to complete. The team adds stories to the current sprint if it has available capacity, or pushes incomplete stories to the next sprint when the current sprint ends.

Our software provides graphical kanban charts enabling project teams to visualize the stories in each sprint, assign them to team members and push or pull stories to and from the project backlog. Story status is displayed as different columns on the kanban chart.

Each project team member has their own personal to-do list and kanban chart, showing their assigned deliverables from all active projects that they are working on. This ensures everyone knows the work they have been assigned, and their deadlines and priorities to complete the work.

Traditional stage & gate project templates may offer very little guidance to project teams on how to complete each deliverable. This can lead to highly variable quality from project to project, relying on the expertise of each project team. Even worse, it can lead to frustration and ‘form filling’ behavior, when a team member does not understand the purpose or relevance of the information being requested.

Our online support center solves this problem by providing detailed guidance on how to complete each standard deliverable in our project templates.  It also includes guidance on the agile and stage & gate methodologies, to help your teams manage their projects accordingly.

Our online support is unique to your installation so you can quickly customize it to reflect your own standard operating procedures and project templates. So it becomes a store of knowledge to share across your organization, helping to achieve consistent, high quality deliverables across projects and improving the skills of your project teams.