Closing the Business Value Loop using Lean Discovery

Agenda:

6:00 - 6:30 - Pizza and networking

6:30 - 6:45 - Introduction

6:45 - 8:00 - Presentation

8:00 - 8:30 - Q&A

Abstract:

Business Agility requires continuous organizational learning and rapid adjustment to internal and external changes in order to maximize the impact of invested resources on organizational goals. And yet, in most organizations “agile” approaches are limited to IT departments with little connection to the rest of the business. As it is, the learning cycles that form the basis of Scrum provide verification and validation of stakeholder needs only as they are expressed in the backlog’s user stories. Even if a sufficiently empowered and accessible Product Owner is available, agile methods offer little guidance on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, the danger persists that agile teams end up very efficiently building products that implement an incomplete and subjective perception of the wants and needs of both the organization and its customers.

In this session, we will explore how Lean thinking expands the “inspect and adapt” loops of agile development and helps systematically determine which features and design choices really provide the greatest organizational value. After a brief introduction to Lean concepts, we will discuss how Lean approaches product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behavior and value perception and builds on agile’s rapid iterative delivery of working software to test these assumptions. Finally, we will examine ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals, such as the Lean UX Hypothesis Statement template and Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping.

About the speaker:

Mathias Eifert is a solutions architect and advocate for agility at all levels of the organization. He has more than fifteen years experience using lean and agile approaches to improve clients’ processes and build better systems. As a consultant to both public and private sector organizations, he has served in a variety of roles, including business analyst, developer, solutions architect, process improvement engineer, trainer, and agile coach. Mathias is a certified Scrum Master, Scrum Product Owner and Software Quality Engineer. He is active in the local agile community and has presented at various meetups.