Jesse Fewell has a nice post of how to deliver less and be more successful. What's interesting is this straight forward agile approach is also the straight forward IMP/IMS approach.
Jesse has three major steps to success
1. Define Business Success
In the IMP/IMS world this means having a defined set of capabilities connected with mission success. What capabilities do we need to accomplish the mission? This could be flying to the moon, driving around in the desert with equipment on board, sailing the ocean blue protecting the fleet.
But the mission statement must be based on capabilities. These capabilities must be defined in Measures of Effectiveness. These capabilities described through:
- Operational concepts
- Partition the system capabilities into classes of service within operational scenarios.
- Connect these capabilities to system requirements using some visual modeling notation. A block diagram to a sysML model.
- Define Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) and Measures of Performance (MoP).
- Define the delivery schedule for each measure of performance and effectiveness.
- Use Cases or Scenarios
-
Define scenarios for each system capability.
-
Connect these scenarios to a Value Stream Map of the increasing maturity of the program.
-
Assess value flow through the map for each needed capability.
-
Identify capability mismatches and make corrections to improve overall value flow.
-
- Assessment of needs, cost, and risks of each capability simulatenously
-
Assign costs to each system element using a value flow model.
-
Assure risk, probabilistic cost and benefit performance attributes are defined.
-
Use cost, schedule and technical performance probabilistic models to forecast potential risks to program performance.
-
- Define explicit, balanced, and feasible alternatives
-
Make tradeoffs that connect cost, schedule, and technical performance in a single location that compares the tradeoffs and their impacts.
-
Use Measures of Effectiveness (MoE) and Measures of Performance (MoP) for these alternative tradeoffs.
-
2. Define the Business Constraints
Build the Plan for the project using an Integrated Master Plan (IMP). The IMP describes the Significant Accomplishments (SA) and the Accomplishment Criteria (AC) for the Packages of Work needed to provide those Significant Accomplishments.
With the SAs and ACs arranged in the proper order to produce increasing maturity of the deliverables, the constraints can be defined:
- Is there enough time and money?
- Are the impediments to progress defined and handled?
- Can you measure progress to plan in units meaningful to the decision makers?
3. Deliver the Mimimum Necessary to meet the Business within the Constraints
This is where the IMP comes in again.
The topology of the Integrated Master Plan and the Integrated Master Schedule is focused on defining the incremental and iterative development of the increasing maturity of the projects capabilities that meet the mission need. This paradigm is applicable to all project domains, technologies, and product and project management methodologies. It is universal.
There are some key outcomes of this approach - the IMP/IMS approach - that can address the concerns raised by Jesse
- All requirements must be traceable to a system capability. Why do we need this requirement? What capability does it support? How does it increase the Effectiveness of the system and how would we measure this Effectiveness in tangible units.
- Over-engineering may be a problem, but the root cause - resulting from the 5 Whys of why is this over-engineered - must be answered first. If we know the Measures of Effectiveness and the Measures of Performance, the Technical Performance Measures, and the Key Performance Parameters, then over engineering is replaced with right engineering.
These issues can be addressed by developing the proper measures, starting with the Mission Need.
For each of the Technical Performance Measures, actual units meaningful to the decision makers can be developed and tracked during the project's life cycle.
No matter the method - agile or traditional - some form of these processes is needed to answer Jesse's need - produce more by doing less. Actually produce more by doing the right amount.
