Inception Phases

Handling Complexity

This week I’ve been having the absolute pleasure of holding my talk on how to run inception phases in front of my colleagues at the Lisbon Equal Experts office.

Tl;Dr

Video of the talk in English here.
Slides and (speaker)notes in English for download here and on slideshare.

The Talk

Taking as examples a real greenfield and brownfield project the talk describes how agile delivery can address the challenge of getting quickly to grips with complex project domains by using a range of lean tools and techniques within a structured inception phase.

The purpose of the early stages of any project (i.e. the ‘inception’ phase) must be to determine the feasibility of and de-risk the subsequent project proper. In practice this generally means answering the question of

What do we think we can deliver with fairly high confidence within the given constraints of the project (budget, time, quality, expectations (i.e. goals/value) and the domain (people, tools, technology)?

This will allow us to start the project proper under the right assumptions, be aware of challenges and risks and literally hit the ground running, thus contributing as major factor into ultimate project success (or being able to make the decision to pivot or not conduct the project at all at a very early stage.

In case of the greenfield project the goal was to build sufficient understanding to be able to define a valuable and realistic release1 (MVP) roadmap, while in the case of the brownfield project, the challenge was more in terms of decomposing / splitting an existing monolithic application in the right way.

Besides illustrating how theses challenges were addressed in practice, this talk outlines a generic inception framework and suggests a range of techniques, tools and methodologies out of which agile project teams can ‘compose’ a skeleton framework to address the challenges they face in their projects, always — of course — with the key goal in mind of mitigating risks and delivering value early! while staying close to user and business, and focus on keeping quality high and build trusted relationships with their clients.

Interested in making / having better software?

Get in touch if you are looking for excellent software engineering capabilities in general or Lisbon specifically. Or, of course, if you are looking ‘just’ for Business Analysis and Product Owner capabilities, be it to deliver, transform or coach, speak to marcel.britsch@beautifulabstraction.com.

(Disclaimer: I’m contracting with Equal Experts so I feel I can recommend Equal Experts pretty much without bias as one of the best software around.)