by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 29, 2014 | Agile, Uncategorized |
In today’s world business leaders are demanding IT organizations deliver high value mobile applications at little cost and lightning speed. And if you’ve worked on any mobile application project, then you know that mobile application development projects can be a challenge. Mobile apps and websites used to simply be a replica of the desktop version of a website, but today they are much more. They are productivity tools, information lifelines and are central to how successful companies are conducting business. For example, in the past marketers used to have to wait and gather campaign statistics – in this day and age, marketing and sales use mobile apps to track campaigns, manage promotions, track inventory – in real-time! By now we’ve all heard of Pinterest and have seen how much growth they have experienced since they first popped up on our social media radar a couple years ago. From inception, Pinterest has seen visits skyrocket by 5,124 percent to more than 28 million visits per week in their second year of business. The result? As an organization, they had to move quickly to successfully support their growth spurts, or risk the trap of ‘growing too fast’ and not being able to keep up with the market demands. They did this through automation, agile tools and strong collaboration between developers and all other operations. In other words, Pinterest was successful because they were able to move quickly and had established an agile development environment early on. One of the key principles of Agile Development is the ability to handle changing requirements even late in the project, and minimize the risk usually...
by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 21, 2014 | Collaboration, Product Development, Uncategorized |
For Part 1: Easy to Talk About, Much Harder to Achieve, read previous blog post For Part 2: Working Together through Product Discovery, read previous blog post In the last blog post we talked about the importance and the opportunities for collaborating during the product discovery phase of the product development lifecycle. In today’s blog post, we take a look at collaboration through the product delivery phase of the product development lifecycle. Collaboration during Product Delivery The second track in the dual track agile approach to product development is the product delivery track. Once a feature has made it onto the product delivery track, it will have been validated for viability and an understanding that the right feature has been defined — but now needs to be built correctly. Easy right? Not without collaboration and validation from your development team, your users, your marketing ream, your design team … well, you get the picture. Just the same as product disovery requires a collaborative validation effort to be successful, so does product delivery. The difference in the product delivery phase is that the focus becomes less of ‘are we building the right product’ — and more of ‘are we building the product right?’ This means the focus shifts towards ensuring a product will be adopted — in other words, the focus is on the usability of a product and ensuring the features that are developed, are developed in such a way that they will actually be used. User adoption is driven by understanding what the user needs Once a product reaches the delivery phase, we know that it is the right product, but that...
by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 17, 2014 | Agile, ITIL and Service Design, Uncategorized |
Join us for two of the newest webinars in our Enfocus Solutions webinar series! Agile Business Transformation May 15th 2014 at 12 PM Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) Agile has become mainstream for developing software. Organizations that have adopted agile have seen improvements in quality, cycle time, and customer satisfaction. Standish Group research shows that agile projects are three times more successful than traditional plan driven projects. However using Agile Development practices does not make an agile organization. Frequent delivery of software provides little value if the software cannot be deployed because of rigid release and change management processes. Another significant challenge facing enterprises is how to coordinate agile teams across multiple projects in multi-disciplined environments. Companies are appointing agile coaches to individual projects, but there is little or no company-wide coordination. In addition, little has been done to help transform the business to be able to respond more rapidly to change. Agile transformation requires focus on four key areas: Agile Discovery Agile Delivery DevOps Agile Business Change In this webinar, John Parker will address these four topics with heavy emphasis on Agile Discovery and Agile Business Change. He will also discuss how BAs and PMs will need to transform to operate in the agile environment. Target Audience: PMOs, Agile Project Managers, Agile Business Analysts, Enterprise Portfolio Managers, and Product Owners Agile & ITIL June 10th 2014 at 12 PM Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada) At first Agile and ITIL seem at odds because of the rigid release and change management process of ITIL and the rapid delivery of software in agile. However, the two frameworks are actually...
by Enfocus Solutions | Apr 1, 2014 | Collaboration, Product Development, Uncategorized |
For Part 1: Easy to Talk About, Much Harder to Achieve, read previous blog post The question of when teams need to collaborate in the product development lifecycle has an easy answer: always. But, there are key activities that take place within a product development lifecycle where collaboration is absolutely necessary. Collaboration through Product Discovery and Product Delivery There is an emerging concept in product management called dual-track agile that essentially looks at product development as two tracks: the product discovery track, and the product delivery track. On the product discovery track, teams collaborate to understand what the right product is to build. On the product delivery track, teams collaborate to make sure the product is built right. (Source: Jeff Patton, www.agileproductdesign.com) Both tracks require a foundation of collaboration and validation in order to be successful. In today’s blog post we’re going to talk about the importance of collaboration through the product discovery phase of product development—when teams are trying to figure out ‘what’ actually needs to be built in order to be of value to the market. Traditionally, in the product development lifecycle the validation of a product doesn’t tend to happen until after the launch of a product or during the validation of a developed prototype. Usually by that time, a significant amount time and money has already been spent on defining and developing the product to some degree—without completely validating that the product will meet a market need. On the product discovery track of the dual track agile approach, the focus is on validation, validation, and validation. Validation that the right problem has been identified, validation that...
by Enfocus Solutions | Mar 27, 2014 | Collaboration, Product Development, Uncategorized |
We’ve all heard about collaboration, talked about collaboration, and probably even agreed that collaboration is really really really important—problem is, it seems much easier to talk about than to actually achieve. One of the key roles a product manager can play in any organization is to bring people together—to bring customers and users together to understand what their problems are and how to best solve them, to bring internal stakeholders together to understand what products will best serve the organization, and to bring the individuals of a product team together to work synchronously towards launching a valuable product that will delight their market and upset their competitors. But the fact is, it’s really challenging to get people harmoniously working together—and just as hard to keep them doing so throughout the entire product development lifecycle. As humans, we are all inclined to fulfill our own needs first—but when it comes to collaboration, those inclinations need to be shifted towards each individual working to fulfill the needs of an entire team before their own. If you’re thinking it sounds like hard work then you’re right—fostering collaboration during the product development lifecycle is indeed hard work. But it’s hard work that pays off. It’s currently estimated that 70-90% of all new products fail. You wouldn’t be alone if your initial reaction to that number is ‘wow!’ It seems like too high of a number—and one that makes launching a new product seem like a pretty bleak undertaking. But if we look at the leading cause of failing products then we might see that there is hope for a solution: the number one...
