Agile (DSDM Atern) and Tailoring PRINCE2
Much like a Venn diagram, PRINCE2 and Agile both have their strengths and weaknesses, but when combined in a tailored manner, such a resulting project will yield the best of both. They already have a common background that being focused on the business case coupled with active business engagement, and an approach that plans and delivers products or deliverables.
Both have the process models along with product descriptions for each project stage as well as defining roles and responsibilities for both management and the team structure. PRINCE2 is built around project management while DSDM Atern integrates project management and project delivery disciplines. There is tremendous scope for combining PRINCE2 and Agile.
PRINCE2 provides a framework for project governance while DSDM Atern provides guidance and techniques for carrying out the project management. PRINCE2 should be applied with a lightness of touch and in this manner will support an agile environment for project, and DSDM Atern would be used for the delivery of products.
The use of iterative development within a DSDM Atern project is central and is based on the mindset that it’s okay not to know everything about the project, and that this encourages experimenting, investigating, and prototyping. Configuration management is used so that such iterative undertakings remain in control as the current level of understanding converges to a more accurate solution.
At a top level, it is important to align the management stages of PRINCE2 with the development life cycle of and actual project. In particular, the use of tolerances would need to be adapted to meet the needs of an agile project. This should be done by setting zero duration tolerance with a narrow tolerance for quality, and the ability to set a variable and white tolerance for scope.
PRINCE2 is seen as a linear and inflexible process model but this is not necessarily true provided careful thought is given to avoid too much bureaucracy. One way in which this can happen is to carry out communication in an informal and flexible way such as the use of models. The focus here should be on communicating to create a better understanding of what needs to be done rather than spending time and effort creating documentation.
Agile Techniques
Facilitated workshops are a key feature of a DSDM Atern project, as they provide a rich level of communication as well as being very effective in terms of time. It also creates a high level of ownership of the final outcome of such facilitated workshops.
Probably the biggest mindset challenge for those familiar with PRINCE2 is to move from a planned prediction of exactly what must happen within a stage, and to instead, working and more iterative fashion with the aim of encouraging investigation and clarification at all levels within the project. This must work for both with the creation of the products and also reaching a mature definition of the business problem and the technical solution to achieve it.
There will be other roles rather than those identified by PRINCE2, and some of these may need to be shared or some other permutation for the roles and responsibilities. One of these roles is the business visionary whose main job is to interpret the strategic needs of the project, and his role could also take on the PRINCE2 role of project assurance.
Another old is that of technical coordinator who would do the same as the business visionary but from a technical viewpoint, and hence could also take on a project assurance role. The role of business ambassador within DSDM Atern must have the authority to ensure that the an agile product delivery environment exists.
The project board executive and the business adviser roles could be filled by the same individual. There are four other roles within DSDM Atern which I will not discuss here, by of business analysts, solution developer, solution tester, and DSDM Atern coach.
Within the a PRINCE2 project, the control of change is seen as vital and should be minimised as much as possible, in particular to avoid the dreaded scope creep. DSDM Atern counters this by keeping the high-level requirements below five, as the project progresses medium level requirements should be less than 100. This has the effect of limiting the types of change that can occur to scope change.
PRINCE2 creates an baselines the project brief and project initiation document and this approach would it have to be modified within an agile project.
DSDM Atern would limits of this by ensuring that the project has sufficient understanding of the products that will be delivered and that the project is viable. Upon the this baselined understanding the project will produce partial versions of the products with the objective to obtain better clarification. This would suggest that the Pre-project process and the initiation stage of PRINCE2 would need to be combined with the product development team of an agile project to help provides investigation and clarification usually via modelling.
The corollary of the above is that the business case may not be pre-defined as in the case of a classic PRINCE2 project; the way forward is for each iteration of the business case to be seen as containing the best information as is possible at that time and using it to move forward at the same time as refining the business case into its ultimate version.
This would suggest that a business case would start off with a wide range forecast in terms of the project outcomes and hence benefits and costs, and this range would reduce as better information arises. In a similar way the, the complete set of products needed to provide the business outcome and their understanding, are likely to evolve.
These very aspects are likely to incur extra business risk and the balance of benefits to costs will also need to evolve. The design philosophy for re-use of a particular version of a business case is that it provides sufficient information to make informed choices at key points throughout the project.
PRINCE2 suggests using MOSCOW standing for must have, should have, could have, or one to have for now, and this is the perfect vehicle for providing scope tolerance within an agile project along with the prioritised requirements list (PRL) from DSDM Atern.
At the very heart of an agile project is the use of time boxing and is vital in keeping a DSDM Atern projects in control. This works were not only supporting the iterative nature of product development bar reflectively stops the temptation to over engineer or pontificate over the development of any of the products.
The design context of time boxing would be quite alien to a conventional PRINCE2 practitioner under no circumstances must be time box duration be extended, rather, the scope of the time box by reduced or acknowledged that the time boxed has failed which flows out that estimates are incorrect and that some form of corrective action is now needed.
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