The Solution

This organization originally found EK using the KM Maturity Self-Assessment, which served as EK’s initial insight into the company and acted as the first input for both the KM Survey Report and KM Strategy Workshop Report. EK began the engagement by conducting various knowledge gathering activities, including interviews and focus groups, to assess the organization’s KM environment at a high level. In order to maximize the efficiency of client resources, EK developed and delivered a KM survey to a wider base of stakeholders to further identify their current KM strengths, challenges, areas for improvement, and priorities as cost-effectively as possible. The outputs of this time-saving survey were then compiled into a KM Survey Report.

Leveraging the KM baseline established by the report, EK planned and conducted a series of KM Strategy workshops in four 4-hour sessions over the course of 2 weeks, facilitating a total of 16 hours of activities with participants and accelerating the knowledge gathering process. These workshops resulted in a comprehensive KM Strategy Workshop Report and Roadmap that included targeted recommendations on how to achieve this organization’s desired target state, emphasizing quick wins and immediate benefits.

The EK Difference

EK began by engaging stakeholders at every level of the organization through interviews, focus groups, and a KM survey to quickly obtain a comprehensive understanding of the organization’s current capabilities. The interviews and focus groups were highly beneficial to this engagement as they allowed EK consultants to engage directly with stakeholders to uncover common problems and elicit consistent themes throughout the process. Because the organization comprised thousands of employees, interviews and focus groups were not enough to obtain a representative sample size. For this reason, EK also created and delivered a KM survey that was distributed to significantly more employees to increase representation and maximize EK’s time with the client. EK worked directly with the primary points of contact from the organization to specifically tailor the survey questions to relevant issues that they had been facing from all across the organization in order to streamline responses and ensure the results were immediately actionable. As a result, EK was able to obtain high qualitative value from direct interactions in the interviews and focus groups, as well as quantitative data and insights from the KM survey, creating a more comprehensive understanding of the organization’s challenges in a shorter period of time.

Further, the KM Strategy Workshops included facilitated lectures and interactive activities on Knowledge Management (KM), Agile, KM Objectives and Success Criteria, KM Challenges and Prioritization, Personas, Content Strategy, Taxonomy Design, Search Design, Governance, Change Management, and Organizational Challenges and Solutioning. These activities were designed to not only inform participants on these subject areas and the value they can provide to an organization, but also to encourage them to engage with one another interactively in applying these concepts to the actual problems they had been facing on a daily basis. By doing so, employees were simultaneously able to see tangible value in the KM solutions and concepts they were learning about, as well as garner enthusiasm and buy-in towards them because of the challenges they could potentially resolve. Furthermore, EK discovered tremendous value in bringing together stakeholders from across the organization, varying in geographic location, business unit, tenure, and experience level, to solve KM challenges together. This resulted in stakeholders finding common ground with one another and uncovering enterprise challenges that were applicable to all levels of the organization, demonstrating the immediate value of KM.

The Results

The results of this workshop, as delivered in the KM Strategy Workshop Report and Roadmap, were targeted recommendations in the form of KM solutions that, with the right investment and execution, can solve all or many of the KM challenges that the organization had been facing. These recommendations were broken down by priority and used realistic constraints such as budget, time, and resourcing. Key success outcomes of the engagement include:

• The KM Survey Report allowed this organization to obtain a broad view of KM needs and challenges from across the organization, as well as tailor the workshop activities and inputs to be organizationally specific and highly applicable to real-world use cases.
• The KM Strategy Workshop Report and Timeline provided a comprehensive overview of all the insights and outputs obtained by EK during the engagement. This included workshop activities and outputs, pain points and areas for improvement, pointed recommendations for how to most effectively progress towards their technical and non-technical KM Target State, and an actionable roadmap that integrated and depicted these recommendations in tandem with one another. This was also instrumental in aligning the stakeholders on where to go from here, reiterating next steps and focusing on expediting an increase in the awareness of KM and its value across the organization.

EK also developed starting points for a business case and further investment in KM by building an excellent relationship with the client and organization as a whole, garnering extensive positive feedback from interview, focus group, and workshop participants as well as buy-in from key stakeholders involved with the engagement. The workshop sessions equipped participants with an agreed-upon definition of KM and an understanding of where it can provide support in their daily work, pushing leadership to strongly consider future KM initiatives. Overall, EK was able to rapidly foster significant organizational interest in and awareness of KM and the KM solutions offered by EK.

The post KM Strategy Workshop and Roadmap for a Global Product Testing Organization appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

EK facilitated a series of workshops, interviews, and focus groups with subject matter experts, content creators, and technical partners to define the current and target state of the retailer’s Content Management maturity using EK’s proprietary 50-factor Content Management Benchmark. EK then partnered with the learning team to define a fully customized, iterative, task-based content management strategy, implementation roadmap, and KM Platform design to help the learning team improve their Content Management maturity over a multi-year period using a phased approach. The KM Platform design featured recommendations to leverage new and existing technologies, including a metadata management hub, taxonomy management system, knowledge graph, and search engine. These technical recommendations have resulted in the creation of a digital library that is currently helping the retailer to more effectively and efficiently manage the sheer scale of content in their learning ecosystem, increase the organization’s speed in creating learning content, and decrease the time it takes associates to find and discover lessons.

The EK Difference

EK leveraged its unique, 50-factor benchmark to develop a comprehensive analysis of the retailer’s Content Management maturity and define a future state for the retailer to work towards. EK also utilized its thorough understanding of the client’s culture and processes to produce a Content Management Strategy and Roadmap for implementation using an iterative, Agile approach, and leveraged in-house technical expertise to recommend a unique set of technological solutions aimed at alleviating the inefficiencies the client was experiencing. 

The EK team was uniquely positioned to deliver expertise in learning solutions because of our extensive experience delivering KM training sessions, workshops, and materials to a variety of clients as well as our in-house team of instructional designers and learning technology experts. We have conducted dozens of similar efforts with organizations like this one, and the EK team was equipped to deliver both hands-on training and in-depth technical support. This enabled us to holistically understand this organization’s needs and develop a strategy to help the learning team find the learning content and training materials they needed to support the organization’s employees. The EK team also demonstrated effective knowledge transfer techniques that the learning team could then utilize within their own training efforts. 

EK is also skilled in bridging the gaps between strategy, design, and implementation, as this effort fused personal interaction with stakeholders to develop a content management strategy with targeted, technical recommendations to plan and implement a KM Platform design. Rather than evaluating just the current state of the organization and developing a strategy to address current challenges, the EK team worked with stakeholders to determine the organization’s long-term goals and recommended various technologies that would help the organization update and maintain its learning content in the future.   

The Results

The retailer and EK’s long-standing partnership allowed them to successfully design, develop, and deploy three major releases for the digital library into the retailer’s production environment, resulting in increased time savings and reduced costs related to developing learning content, as well as a workforce with the necessary skills and expertise to do their jobs effectively and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. The retailer was able to gain an improved visibility into each associate’s capabilities and an enhanced ability to identify gaps in their learning content, resulting in more targeted learning experiences to upskill employees and guide their professional development. Additionally, the renewed consistency, reuse, and findability of learning materials allowed the retailer to mitigate any repercussions associated with on-site store safety, diversity and inclusion, and employee and customer health and wellbeing.

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The Solution

EK performed initial user and system research and analysis to identify issues and recommend solutions to improve overall UX. As part of this research, EK facilitated cross-departmental focus groups and workshops with stakeholders and SMEs, in addition to conducting a current and target state analysis. During these activities, EK identified strengths and challenges in multiple aspects of the content lifecycle, from authoring and publishing to end-user content engagement. The challenges identified in the analysis provided an opportunity to identify and prioritize relevant use cases, which helped shape the Agile product roadmap and EK’s tool recommendations. Additionally, the analysis enabled EK to identify user goals and evaluation criteria that could be measured to test solution effectiveness. The EK team also collaborated with taxonomy SMEs to review and improve the existing content metadata, providing the foundations for more granular content tagging. EK then developed an Agile product roadmap that incorporated our UX and system recommendations with iterative milestones and collaborated with the client company on implementing the multi-workstream roadmap to ensure the client company met its goals and improved solution effectiveness.

EK’s user and system research found a cycle of challenges that reduced user confidence in the client’s documentation hub.

The EK Difference

The EK team leveraged our experience with taxonomy design, ontology design, UX best practices, and enterprise search to design an Agile roadmap to achieve expanded search capabilities, governance workflows, and more personalized content experiences. Our certified taxonomists and ontologists collaborated with client company SMEs to capture and translate existing metadata and authoring processes into an expanded taxonomy that the CCMS could leverage for granular content tagging. EK’s expert taxonomy and ontology designers discerned metadata pain points to design and deliver data models that would support the client company’s current and future advanced user-driven use cases. EK also leveraged our knowledge graph experience to implement and query the data models created by the ontology designers to support the prioritized use cases surfaced from our initial research and analysis. The EK team leveraged our advanced content management, search, and knowledge management solution architecture experience to design a new system architecture that enables dynamic content assembly, improves search experience, provides personalized content to system users, and decreases manual authoring time spent creating the content.

The Results

EK delivered a state-of-the-art solution architecture that enables increased granular tagging of componentized content for improved content and metadata management, content reuse across multiple end-user content experiences, and a streamlined content authoring process. The focus groups that EK conducted enabled the EK team to include and inform multiple departments across the organization, facilitating future cross-department collaboration. After applying the content changes, EK worked with the client to reevaluate user feedback on the site and found that

• Users were more satisfied with the content experience,
• Users were much more accurate with their answers, and
• Users were able to find answers in almost half the time.

The bench-marked structured Agile roadmap will enable the team to socialize the architecture and governance changes within the organization, communicating and promoting momentum and buy-in for the architecture and governance implementation.

The post User-Centric Content Engineering to Improve Customer Experience appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

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The post Why Practical Knowledge Management Matters More Than Ever appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

1. Decide How You Will Decide

At the core of decision making, you’ll find a sense of identity and a set of values. That is, how you define who you are as an organization and what’s important to you is often what drives the decisions you make. This differs from organization to organization– for some it may be revenue gained from a public-facing website, while for others it may be more mission-driven objectives around knowledge sharing via the organization’s intranet.

“Deciding how you will decide” means reflecting on the factors that are most critical to reaching your organization’s potential, then designing a tool to help you measure the degree to which each of your goals will bring you closer to doing so.

This tool can be as simple as a quad chart, a la Stephen Covey:

Or, this tool can be more sophisticated like a weighted prioritization matrix with quantitative and qualitative measures like the one below.

At EK, we’ve used a prioritization scorecard like this one to help our clients get a handle on large scale KIM change efforts that involve the entire organization. It’s helpful in breaking down the effort into manageable pieces, such as departments, projects, or releases. Each sub-effort can then be analyzed and assessed along a scale of relative priority measures.

Based on this analysis, you can generate a set of graphs to plot your results. For example, Value vs. Effort or Audience vs. Project Size. A visual we find particularly insightful at EK is Business Value vs. Technical Complexity vs. Foundational Value, which you can see plotted in the sample graph below.

Focusing on the foundational elements of your KIM system, such as your governance plan, content type templates, and style guides will greatly benefit all of your other efforts that come after it. This is especially true when you can deliver foundational elements with high business value and low technical complexity.

2. Limit Your WIP

Once you’ve identified the order in which you’ll tackle your goals, you’ll need to set a WIP. WIP stands for “Work in Progress” and limiting your WIP means choosing one thing to focus on at a time, or more as your resources allow.

I’m just as guilty as anyone in trying to do everything all at once, but so much energy is wasted with each cognitive shift. You may appear to be very busy when you’re multi-tasking, but actual results come from taking a deeper dive into one thing, getting into a state of flow, and creating something that didn’t previously exist whether that’s a solution, deliverable, a new piece of functionality, or thought piece. It’s even more exciting when you’re able to get an entire team or organization passionately working towards the same goal.

There are two tools I recommend for allowing you to see the big picture and the little picture simultaneously:

Big Picture: Create a Roadmap

Creating a roadmap like this one will show you how you’ve prioritized your goals, when you’ll be working on each goal, and it will also give you a realistic picture of how much time you have to meet all of your commitments.

It’s important to be as realistic as possible when estimating how long it will take you to achieve each goal, but the real secret is to take into consideration the day-to-day tasks you’ll have to attend to that may not necessarily be aligned with your primary objective.

Little Picture: Set up a Kanban Board

Decomposing your goals into actionable tasks is key. A Kanban Board like Trello is an effective way to create a list of everything you have to do, which then allows you to move each item along to a “done” column as you complete each task.

Make sure that you monitor how many items are in your “In Progress” column because limiting your WIP means starting and completing a small number of tasks rather than just starting a whole lot of tasks.

3. Track Your Progress

Everyone loves getting “points.” Whether they’re brownie points, financial points, rewards points, or points in a game, you feel like you’re winning as your number of points rise. Assign points to each of the tasks you’ll need to complete in order to reach your ultimate goal. As your team completes each task, reward yourselves with points and watch your progress climb using something like this Burn Up chart below.

Charts like these will also help you to quickly see when you’re flatlining. This should be a signal that you either need to redirect your focus or reassess your priorities.

4. Celebrate Your Successes

Take time after each win to acknowledge and reward your accomplishment. A little celebration after each win could be just the fuel your team needs to keep going even stronger.

As a part of your celebration, create opportunities to learn from what went right and what could have improved as you worked towards each success. Here are a few tips from my previous blog about how to do so by facilitating retrospectives.

Being agile means focusing on the most important things first and continuously reassessing what’s at the top of the list. By doing so, you’ll be able to demonstrate value throughout the year rather than getting to the end only to realize that you haven’t completed much at all. Interested in how we’ve used these tools and techniques for large-scale digital transformation initiatives? Contact Enterprise Knowledge at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

The post Prioritization Best Practices for Knowledge & Information Management appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Like many organizations with whom we work, we found that our site organization, performance, and interface were becoming impediments to the deep and rich content we were sharing on our site. To that end, we brought our own team together to redesign our site in a way that would serve as a case study. Our new site bridges the gap between Content and Knowledge Management. It offers “traditional” website content and functionality, but also incorporates a knowledge base of EK’s experience and expertise.

We’re proud of what we’ve designed, not least of which because it demonstrates that we also practice the very same recommendations and guidance we offer to our clients. This site shows who EK is, what we do, and why we do it. It is also a key tool to help us realize one of our guiding principles, to be thought leaders, sharing our knowledge and expertise with the industry as a whole.

The following are the best practices for website and knowledge base design that resulted in the site you’re currently experiencing.

Go Agile, Really

One of EK’s core services is Agile Transformation & Facilitation, so it’s no surprise we begin here. Though Agile concepts are most commonly associated with software development, they are equally, if not more applicable and valuable in regards to knowledge management and information management design. Projects such as these require maximum touch points between the design and development team, the business users, and the end users.

As consultants, we’ve often heard some version of the phrase, “I don’t know what I want, but I’ll know when I see it.” Our Agile approach to design enables this concept. Without it, you run the risk of straying toward the dreaded “big bang” deployment that results in missed expectations, missed deadlines, and unhappy stakeholders.

We ran our entire initiative, from initial goal setting and understanding of our users, through testing and content population, leveraging the same true Agile approach we apply to our customers. As a result, we were able to engage our end users, react to surprises, and adjust to the changing views that are inherent in such an effort.

Content is Still King 

You’d think that after a couple decades with the “Content is King” phrase beaten to death, organizations would recognize that content is, in fact, pretty important. For our own initiative, we decided at the outset that every hour dedicated to the design or development of the site should be matched with two hours dedicated to the creation, curation, and enhancement of content within it.

In advance of our new site, we focused on 1) Enhancing existing content, 2) Creating new content, 3) Maximizing our social media engagement to drive new traffic. Of these three components, by far the most important was enhancing the existing content. Any time a site goes through a migration or upgrade, there will be some level of chaos. We always recommend harnessing that chaos and piggybacking on top of it, in order to ensure the existing content is the best it can be.

This content enhancement included a copy edit of all existing content, a thorough weeding of that which wasn’t up to our standards, and a review of existing naming, placement, tagging, and imagery. For the imagery, we took advantage of the effort to dial up and standardize the style and quality of our graphics. We also assessed all of our content tagging to ensure consistency and findability (more on that below).

Coupled with this effort, we developed a new web style guide for our site so that voicing, capitalization, and other similar efforts (oxford comma, spaces after periods, etc.) would be consistent moving forward.

Taxonomy, Faceting, and Overall Findability 

One of the first features we knew we wanted to include in our site was a faceted browse/search feature for our knowledge base. Having worked with hundreds of organizations to arrive at highly impactful taxonomy design, we wanted to ensure we had our own “demonstration” of this increasingly critical site feature.

As we would’ve done for any customer, we ran internal taxonomy design workshops to identify and prioritize our most important metadata fields and then define values for each. We settled on Topic, Document Type, and Author as EK’s three key fields, and supplemented this with a broader set of defined keywords to be applied as metadata for search engine optimization and increased categorization and search efficacy.

User Interface Doesn’t Just Mean Flash 

We leveraged our standard design methodology in order to progress the look and feel and navigational elements of the site. We defined user personas, prioritized them, created user journeys, and then user stories for each. Months before development began, we ran team workshops to progress our site design from rough concepts to high fidelity wireframes. We wanted a site that was visually compelling, for sure, but more importantly we wanted a site that would allow our users to complete their missions, while experiencing EK’s unique “personality.”

One of the most important elements of us, for this, was to ensure the site was rich with photos of the team, our space, and our work products. Together with our rich content, this tells the story of EK.

We also focused designing a site that would work across a range of devices. Though our design was “desktop first,” the mobile interface, leveraging a completely responsive design, provides all the same functionality and feel in easy to digest components.

Open Source, in the Cloud 

Though we do an equal amount of work leveraging commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products, we made an early decision to leverage Open Source Content Management for our solution. We progressed this decision leveraging our standard process, selecting and prioritizing system functionality and features at a high level, then iterating in increasing detail until we had a clear set of functional stories of what we needed to be able to do with the site.

Just as we do with our clients, we evaluated a range of potential options, including Drupal, Alfresco, and WordPress. We settled on WordPress for the site as it provided all the necessary capabilities with the lowest administrative burden.

Our site is deployed in the cloud. After all, EK does a lot, but we’re not a hosting shop and we don’t want to dilute our focus by trying to be one.

The product of our efforts is our new website. We accompanied its creation with the development of a content governance plan and fresh editorial calendar, focused on ensuring the site and its contents evolve toward the better moving forward. We hope you visit often, as we’re committed to continuing our thought leadership and keeping the content fresh. If you’re thinking about a site redesign or refresh of your own, we’re here to help.

The post Website Design Best Practices appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

While many IT businesses want to go agile, many of them do not know where to start. Others come to us after a failed agile transformation in which a development team was sent to a Certified ScrumMaster training and told they were agile without being armed with the practical tools to succeed. Indeed, many of our clients do not realize they may need to change their organization design, SDLC processes, or technology infrastructure to maximize success in their agile transformation.

In order to help our clients get started with agile quickly and understand underlying changes that may need to happen for them to support an agile environment, we created an Agile Design Workshop. The overarching goal of this workshop is to create a strategy and plan to maximize our clients’ investments in agile.

The advantages of a workshop methodology for agile implementations are threefold. First, the workshop is a low-risk, low-cost way for business leaders to understand what it takes to be agile and create an actionable set of next steps to continue on their agile journey in a smart, sustainable way. Each organization or team will need to take slightly different steps to build fertile ground for adopting agile.

Second, there are typically varying levels of understanding of agile throughout the technology industry, government and private sector, and the workshop includes one day of built-in agile training. Agile is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but often suffers from a lack of shared understanding. The benefit of this training is that it allows participants to end the workshop speaking the same language and expecting the same outcomes as they plan to go agile.

Third, the workshop can be scaled to include the actual future practitioners of agile. This means it serves as a powerful change management tool to get buy-in and solicit input from those who might otherwise resist the change. With a lack of change management as one of the major reasons agile transformations fail, this piece is critical to starting the effort on the right note.

In order to elicit useful information, we lead workshop participants through a number of activities that will serve as crucial inputs into the organization’s customized agile transformation roadmap. Here is a sampling of three activities our clients have found valuable during past workshops:

• Cultural factors play a major part in the success (or failure) of an agile transformation. In this exercise, we ask participants to identify a current state of tailored cultural factors that impact their organization the most. For example, past factors we have measured include risk vs. reward, individual accountability vs. team accountability, or urgency vs. deliberation in decision-making. In this example, perceptions may differ based on factors like seniority or geographic region, so it’s important to include a diverse array of participants.
• Identifying a common vision is an important step toward working together toward an agile transformation. In this activity, we lead participants through a visioning activity to define the desired future state. Many organizations that are large or long tenured have a good deal of organizational debt – which can range from outdated policies to a high degree of complexity in technology systems. Naturally, expecting this organization to function like a technology startup may not be realistic. However, adopting agile is still possible, especially in a grass-roots or incremental fashion. This activity helps participants define a clear, achievable target state that is unique to their organization.
• Developing and prioritizing the agile transformation backlog is a crucial step to investing resources wisely. The agile transformation backlog is a prioritized list of all the work that needs to be done for an organization to reach its transformation goals. Many teams and organizations may feel overwhelmed with the amount of change required for teams to adopt agile; clear priorities and limits for simultaneous work in progress will help show progress early and prevent burnout.

Interested in booking an Agile Design Workshop for your team or organization? Contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

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What is Agile Software Development?

It is important to understand what Agile software development is before attempting to understand how to provide IV&V services for Agile projects.  This definition for Agile software development comes from Wikipedia:

“Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, in which requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that promotes foreseen tight iterations throughout the development cycle.”

This definition does a nice job of identifying the differences between Agile development and the older Waterfall development approach.  Some of the key differences that are applicable to IV&V services include:

• Iterative development;
• Evolving requirements and solutions; and
• Flexible response to change.

Many people worry that Agile projects lack control.  When do requirements and development end?  How do project sponsors control change to ensure that deliverables meet their client’s goals?   The fact is a well-run Agile project offers more controls to ensure that customers get what they want.  The very differences highlighted above are the reason that it is successful.  Iterative development gives the business an opportunity to test early versions of the product to make sure that they are getting what they expect.  Evolving requirements and solutions allow business owners to get a better understanding of what they are building before finalizing their list of what they need.  Flexible response to change means that the coordinated team can adjust priorities as they learn more about the solution being built.

Agile development is gaining traction because this new approach costs less, delivers solutions sooner, and helps ensure that the business users get what they really want as opposed to what IT understood from a set of written requirements.  That is not to say that Agile development occurs in the absence of documentation.  To the contrary, Agile development is based on necessary documentation rather than the traditional development process, which often requires a specific set of documentation regardless of its usefulness to the project.

What is IV&V?

Independent verification and validation (IV&V) is easy to define but not easy to understand why it is important.

For IV&V to be independent means that it meets the three parameters of technical, managerial, and financial independence from the project or program.  This is achieved when IV&V is conducted by an organization that is separate from the development and program management organizations.  The verification and validation processes are used to determine whether the development products of a given activity actually conform to the requirements of that activity and whether the product satisfies its intended use and user needs.  IV&V is applied to systems, software, hardware and their interfaces.

Having IV&V helps to ensure requirements are complete, consistent, unambiguous and can be validated; that requirements trace to the design and that the design does not create new requirements; that the code implements all the requirements allocated to the software and that the system meets all the requirements allocated to the system.  IV&V then determines whether the system meets the user and the business needs.

IV&V efforts review documents, processes, and procedures against standards and good engineering practices to determine the goodness of each.  IV&V will recommend accepting or rejecting a product based on its evaluation of that product.  IV&V will recommend continuing to the next phase in the development lifecycle based on its assessment of the products and processes that are required for the proper completion of the current phase.  These recommendations are based on objective evidence resulting from assessing products and processes against standards and good engineering practices.

The activities performed by IV&V occur regardless of the development methodology being used.  Regardless of whether the methodology is incremental, Waterfall, or Agile, documents are assessed, processes and procedures are reviewed, and objective evidence is provided to support the decision to accept the product or go to the next phase.

Best Practices for IV&V on Agile Projects

We have developed 5 best practices for IV&V of Agile development practices.

1. Identify the Control Points

Each agile methodology has its own set of control points.  They typically revolve around the development iterations.  Scrum, for example, has 5 standard meetings during each iteration (A.K.A. sprint).  These include: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective.  The key control points for a Scrum are the Sprint Planning and Sprint Review meetings.  These are the meetings that talk about business value and what gets included in each sprint.  Each control point requires certain objective information be available for informed decision-making.  Whether the information is based on concept documentation, use cases, or test results IV&V insures the accuracy, completeness, consistency, and traceability of the documentation to the product.

2. Review the Backlog

Agile projects, by definition, have a backlog of user stories or development tasks that need to be accomplished.  These backlog items can be considered analogous to requirements in a Waterfall project.  The best way to make sure that new items are not out of scope from what the business wants is to regularly review new and changed backlog items.  IV&V provides objective evidence about the accuracy, completeness, consistency, and testability of user stories.  Objective evidence is required as changes are made.  IV&V assesses the desired change for impact on existing tasks and products.

3. Manage the Roadmap

Agile projects typically begin with a high level roadmap to guide the project.  Each development iteration works against a more granular set of requirements based on the initial roadmap.  The IV&V team needs to make sure that the work being done always aligns with the initial roadmap.

4. Question Business Value

Agile has a concept called minimum viable product (MVP).  The goal of any Agile project is to launch the minimum viable project as soon as possible.  All too often, development teams build too much into their product.  Agile attempts to stop that from happening by launching products when they meet the minimum requirements to launch.  This is not always successful.  The IV&V team can act as an independent party to validate that each new story or business requirement adds value over and above the cost of delivery to minimize wasted effort.

5. Validate Consistent Practices 

Too often, organizations claim they are doing Agile development to avoid some of the rigidity and structure seen in the Waterfall methodologies.  This can be easy to do because very few people understand Agile and Agile does not have a hard and fast methodology.  It is important to understand what Agile is (see the description above) and to ensure that there are a set of repeatable practices in place with each development iteration.  The IV&V team can play the role of “process cop” to make sure that an Agile structure is in place.  The IV&V team  also ensures that the processes adapted by the team are adequate and are being followed.

In closing, Agile development is new and gaining traction in nearly every area of IT development.  The rules for Agile are quite different from the waterfall development methodology.  Agile development is more fluid and allows for a greater level of change throughout a project.  This does not, however, mean that Agile development is unstructured or uncontrolled.  An IV&V team with Agile experts can identify key control points on a project and make sure that the government gets the same level of independent validation they would get with a Waterfall project or from an iterative development project with specified life cycle processes.

If you are beginning an Agile project and looking for IV&V support, Enterprise Knowledge and The IV&V Group® are ready to help.

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Enterprise Knowledge’s Joe Hilger will be co-presenting at the May 27th IEEE Software Special Interest Group meeting in McLean, VA.  Hilger and Mark Shima of CIO Accelerators will share interesting ways to make Agile projects deliver real business value at scale.  Hilger will leverage his experience from over 20 years of information management project management and delivery for over 100 clients as part of the presentation.  To register and for more information, click here.

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