Agile (DSDM Atern) and Tailoring PRINCE2
Much like a Venn diagram, PRINCE2 and Agile have their strengths and weaknesses, but when combined in a tailored manner, the resulting project will yield the best of both. They already have a common background that is 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, product descriptions for each project stage, and 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 project management. PRINCE2 should be applied with a lightness of touch and, in this manner, will support an agile environment for the project, and DSDM Atern would be used to deliver products.
The use of iterative development within a DSDM Atern project is central. It 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 essential 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 better understand what needs to be done rather than spending time and effort creating documentation.
Agile Techniques
Facilitated workshops are a vital feature of a DSDM Atern project, as they provide a rich level of communication and are very effective in time. It also creates a high level of ownership of such facilitated workshop’ outcomes.
Probably the biggest mindset challenge for those familiar with PRINCE2 is to move from a planned prediction of precisely what must happen within a stage to working a more iterative fashion to encourage investigation and clarification at all levels within the project.
This must work for both the creation of the products and also for reaching a mature definition of the business problem and the technical solution to achieve it.
There will be other roles than those identified by PRINCE2, and some of these may need to be shared or permutations 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 a 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 the business ambassador within DSDM Atern is to have the authority to ensure that the agile product delivery environment exists.
The same individual could fill the project board executive and business adviser roles. There are four other roles within DSDM Atern, which I will not discuss here, business analysts, solution developer, solution tester, and DSDM Atern coach.
Within the 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 baselines of the project brief and project initiation document, and this approach would it have to be modified within an agile project.
DSDM Atern would limit of this by ensuring that the project has a sufficient understanding of the products that will be delivered and that the project is viable. Upon 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 provide investigation and clarification, usually via modeling.
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 with a broad 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 complete set of products needed to provide the business outcome and their understanding are likely to evolve.
These aspects will likely incur extra business risk, and the balance of benefits to costs will also need to evolve. The design philosophy for the 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 heart of an agile project is the use of time boxing which is vital in keeping a DSDM Atern project in control. These works not only support the iterative nature of product development but reflectively stop the temptation to over-engineer or pontificate over the development of any of the products.
The design context of time boxing would be pretty alien to a conventional PRINCE2 practitioner. Under no circumstances must the time box duration be extended, instead, the scope of the time box be reduced or acknowledged that the time box has failed, which flows out that estimates are incorrect and that some form of corrective action is now needed.
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