Subscribe

Agile drives greater team collaboration

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 15 May 2015
For the team to be successful the business needs to understand value management, says IndigoCube's Jaco Viljoen.
For the team to be successful the business needs to understand value management, says IndigoCube's Jaco Viljoen.

There is a mistaken belief that an agile environment does not need business analysis, but in reality agile teams need to understand business requirements, and their priorities, to deliver value.

So said Jaco Viljoen, principal consultant at IndigoCube, speaking during an agile seminar at IBM's offices in Sandton yesterday.

Viljoen said business analysts are under increasing pressure to improve performance in today's fast-moving and competitive economy, in which speed to market is becoming a key success factor.

He said the emergence of agile techniques to drive greater team collaboration is prompting business analysts and other team members to adopt new behaviour.

In an agile environment, analysis is not centred on one person's role but on team work, added Viljoen.

For the team to be successful, the business needs to understand value management and how it affects the business, he said.

Teams are created to help a business realise a part of its vision, if the individuals don't know the goal they are trying to satisfy and why achieving that goal is important, then the team is unlikely to realise the project's goals, noted Viljoen.

Value management is much more than simple analysis - it is a project management technique for measuring project performance and progress from the beginning to the end, he explained.

"Agile teams need to understand value management; also they need different types of techniques that can be used when needed. This will ultimately help the team by building consensus on what needs to be done."

To be successful, an agile a business needs to be able to change their priorities - a successful team should be able to respond to changes in a timely fashion, said Viljoen.

They have to continuously refine the backlog (to do list) - the items that are on the backlog must be continuously sequenced and prioritised if they are to be used for planning and development, he added.

Viljoen noted prioritised backlog is simply a list of work that needs to get done that is ordered by priority; the work at the top of the list is the most important and should be done first.

Prioritisation normally causes problems, especially if there are different business units with different objectives competing for the agile team's time, he added.

"Many times the manager with the biggest seniority determines the priority - according to what he believes is most important and not what is best for the economic outcome of the business."

Sequencing based on cost of delay is proven to be a good technique. It ensures that value with a high cost of delay is delivered first so that everyone wins, said Viljoen.

Share