The Vision Thing: How Do You Charter? #agile2011

We held a “Fringe” session at Agile 2011 to discuss how people charter or kick off projects.

Elements of “Kickoff”

[These are in no particular order.]

  • Vision
  • Release Criteria
  • Success Criteria
  • From and To State
    • Business capability
    • Solution vision
  • Risks / Fears
  • Rallying One-Liner [may match up to Vision]
  • [Early] Backlog (maybe)
  • Mission
  • Team Agreements / Social Contract
  • Community [incl. users, customers]
  • Project Boundary
  • Domain Language
  • Scope Discussion
    • Tradeoffs
    • What’s the minimum?
    • “Big rocks”
    • “Not” List
  • Guiding Principles
  • Resources / Constraints

Factors / Approaches / Techniques

  • Innovation Games
  • Metaphor
  • Mini-design studios (e.g., to explore shared understanding of “commitment”)
  • Sliders
  • Ranking
  • “Not” List /  In-Out List
  • Sr. and other management present
  • No iteration 0 [get going instead]
    • -or-
  • Iteration zero that includes a skinny end-to-end “Hello World”
  • Timeboxes
  • Quickstart approach
  • Experimentation
  • Inception Deck

Thanks to all who participated!