Philip
Ross
Monitise
FinKit Project
Let me give you a tangible example of an Agile project that
I have worked on.
I did a project for Monitise, through Endava. Endava are
strong at delivering programming teams using Agile.
But this wasn’t where we needed an Agile approach, we needed
an Agile approach around the analysis.
What was the project?
Monitise are a City of London based, mobile payment
specialists with a track record of developing mobile apps for many leading
banks and financial institutions, such as Nat West, RBS.
There project was move away from developing individual
installations for their clients to building a cloud based SAAS\PAAS platform
based using IBM’s Bluemix.
What was your role?
I was the first analyst on the project. I realised that
while there was some strong corporate objectives and some technical vision,
there wasn’t enough business vision.
My job was to elicit not just requirements, but an
articulation of that business vision and was then to have that cascade down
into something that could be built.
Were you alone?
I recruited other business analysts, I realised we needed
people with strong communication skills, rather just head down process clerks.
I moved the analysts from working individually as part of
the development teams, to sitting together and closer to the business.
The stage that we were at was that we needed business
analysts not systems analysts
How was the team organised as AGILE?
So I set the team up as an self-organising AGILE team or
PRACTISE.
The principles were that there was to be no siloed working.
We all needed to know everything, anyone could represent the PRACTISE at any
meeting. Which astonished other teams, that the most senior person wasn’t going
to all the top meetings, but really empowered our group and served as a
powerful example elsewhere.
We did our own standups as a team, or via Skype. We had
regular sessions of sharing vision and knowledge with each other.
Our team grew in informally include the product managers
from the client. The Product Director, felt that we were like her Cabinet. We
did focus on those agile values, particularly on individuals and interactions.
What did you produce?
We need to define a clear business vision and articulate it.
We needed a MVP definition.
As someone who has worked in media and politics and as a
lobbyist I know the importance of communication and having a clear message.
Also I understand that communication isn’t about broadcast
and publishing, but is about listening and understanding.
We produced a NARRATIVE, like a magazine article that gace
the high level view and explanation of the project.
From that we developed EPICS.
Off of the EPICS we wrote user stories using SBE
Dev team used those user stories, in a two cycles we would
expand EPICS to user stories and they would work on them.
We would run sessions with DEV teams to explain the business
objectives and EPICS
DEV team would create tasks that could be traced back to the
NARRATIVE
We would work also with QA teams to repeat explanations
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