Mastering Agile Product Development
At a regional gathering of IT professionals we asked the following questions.
“True or False… New product ideas primarily come from management in my organization.”
The answers were a 50/50 split.
“True or False… Securing funding for a product is difficult.”
Once again, the answer is split right down the middle. The same respondents who agreed that new ideas come from management also said that funding a product was not difficult.
The truth is, no matter how necessary a product may be to develop, often there will be many hurdles to overcome to get that product designed, especially if management is not bought into the idea from inception. Often, you will be asked questions like:
What are the requirements?
How much is this going to cost?
How long will it take?
What are the risks?
What is the ROI?
How much do we know about it?
Then you ask yourself, is spending lots of time analyzing and evaluating a new product even worth it?
Even after you get funding, you are facing issues in the development stage, such as:
Fighting through organizational red tape
Dealing with downstream complexities
Lengthy launch times
Building too many features before testing the product in production
Rather than stalling on development because the planning phase isn’t perfected, or putting a product into production before it is ready, use our Agile Methodologies to help guide you along the way. Develop value-based objectives and drive to several quick production releases. Using this method, you can swing your production in a different direction without having to scrap an entire product or waste funding. And if you need more funding, you can use the mini releases as evidence. If something breaks, you don’t lose 3 months of production, you may only lose 2 weeks and your teams are, in conjunction with your sprints, being productive in other areas.
Many organizations are still learning that getting the funding you need to create useful and effecttive products is just one Agile sprint away.
