Some agile practitioners would object to the statement that you can just take the best from agile rather than adopting it in full. Indeed, as we know, agile is a mindset. Becoming agile takes time and requires practice.
I believe that while teams and organizations are still considering agile as their future project management framework, they can start looking into some of the best agile practices to improve their profitability and overall delivery quality. Some of those practices can be easily integrated into a traditional project management framework.
Value-driven delivery is a great example of such practices. As a service delivery project manager, I used to work with many telecommunication companies in Europe back in the early 2000’s, helping them improve their customer experience through voice mail and IVR capabilities. Our company had a well-established core product, and while most of our clients purchased the generic version of it, they always requested some additional customization. Our customer service projects were created around those customizations. The complexity of those projects was quite different – we worked with budgets that varied between $10K and $10M.
Clearly, bigger projects took longer to deliver. The telecom industry was booming and it was very important for our clients to create new features before their competitors would do so. They often requested deliveries in chunks. Our teams estimated features and delivered them in multiple phases. Prioritization was done by the customer; estimations were done by the project team.
In many cases, as a project manager, I came across situations where a very important product feature that looked quite complex to the client was very easy to implement, and vice versa – some minor product tweak required weeks of development. Knowing that helped me negotiate the best deals with the client.
Most important, my clients were constantly receiving value – not just at the very end of the project. Our teams worked on multiple projects at a time, so while one feature was being developed, another one was in testing room. Did we call this agile back then? – Probably not. Did we apply one of agile best practices? – Evidently, we did.
Value-driven delivery focuses on early delivery of business value. Such an approach gives better project work visibility to the client by keeping them consistently involved in decision-making and validation, improves adaptability to changing requirements, increases business value at early project stages and reduces the overall project risk status. Along with definite advantages for the client, value-driven delivery improves the effectiveness of the delivering organization by reducing so–called “waste”, i.e. extra processes, extra features, task-switching and waiting time.
The terms MVP (minimal viable product) and MMF (minimal marketable feature) are very strong business driving concepts that can substantially increase the profitability of your client organization and eventually the profitability and efficiency of your own organization. These products and features are typically selected by the business (or the product owner) and assessed for implementation by the project team.
Even if your organization has not adopted agile project management, having product releases and a list of prioritized features for each release could still be a good option. Those releases can exist under any framework as long as the framework is established in a professional way.