Last week, I got a chance to meet the IT Leader of my company’s very big client and was asked to present my work experience with Agile{ Business Intelligence-BI}.
The Project that he led mainly used the Oracle Apps as the HRMS, Informatica and Business Objects as the BI suite and OBIEE for the Analytics. The meeting started off with standard questions like drivers for using Agile, the benefits of the methodology and its disadvantages. Later we got into a discussion where by the client presented us a scenario.
Their IT had a fixed release plan for the entire year. They had monthly production releases and within a month they followed a standard waterfall or toll-gate approach. He wanted to study our system to see how that could be related to his company’s way of working.The entire team got involved wherein we asked the lead of each project to identify the waste in their processes.The points that came up were as follows:
- User acceptance Testing was very slow because of which they could not meet the deadline.
- Meetings were long.
- Knowledge retention.
- A lot of time was spent in upfront design. In one of the examples stated, they had to change the entire design because of the required changes.
- Requirements discussion happened at two stages; one between the users and IT managers and then between IT managers and the team. Hence, the requirements signoff was a lengthy process
- There was a separate QA Team who missed certain key points because of complete ignorance.
Solution to these problems were Standard Agile Principles like Automation testing, Intact and co-located teams,in time design, cancellation of unnecessary meetings,Cross functional teams,etc. He then agreed that if used diligently,it could help the team. The conclusion was that Agile makes you think and discourages one to be complacent. This was the best part of it…….
The other thing I learnt in the meeting was about the Retrospectives we have. We normally reflect on things like what went well and what did not.But also important are two questions: What did we learn between the last retrospective and now and What is something that still puzzles us??? I guess its a good food for thought…………………….
Overall it was a great learning experience about Agile. Looking forward to many such opportunities in future………………………..
