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Information management ( IM ) and business intelligence ( BI ) projects are continuing to grow in popularity , with more organisations planning to make the most of the data they hold to give them a competitive edge .
Conrad Bates is a Managing Partner at C3 Business Solutions , has previously led the Public Sector BI Strategy practice for IBM and held consulting roles at PricewaterhouseCoopers and Teradata ( NCR ). He has delivered largescale public and private sector solutions in Australia , the US , New Zealand , Taiwan , the Netherlands and China .
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With a traditional software development lifecycle ( SDLC ) or waterfall approach to development , you must gather all of your requirements upfront and then you commence the development cycle . That cycle could take many months to complete , by which time your business has changed fundamentally and those requirements no longer meet the needs of the business . You ’ re delivered a solution that is out-dated even before it goes live . An agile delivery approach , however , focuses on adaptability and enables your development team / s to start delivering value to the business even before the requirements are complete . It focuses your team / s in on what is most important now and keeps you working with this critical view in mind . Over a two- or three-week development sprint , you can release code to the business that fulfils a particular requirement - immediate , regular , incremental value .
An agile IM approach is about making the complex simple ; stripping back to bare minimum with a singular goal in mind . With agile IM , the goal is what ’ s important , not the documentation and bureaucracy . Agile IM by its pure nature is a highly adaptive approach ; it ’ s light on process and heavy on outcome .
So , as your business requirements change , so too does the focus of your development teams . Critical to agile IM success is the connection between the business and IT . A business or product owner is incorporated into the team to ensure that
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the business ’ s needs are central to the work being undertaken .
In short , to make agile IM successful , you must … 1 . Be open to change and have a desire to do things differently . You must place all value on the outcome , not on the process to get there . Change the approach to work estimation and constantly reassess and learn . Change the requirements management approach , use business stories to scope the work . Project governance can be improved through agile methods .
2 . Have the right problem with a moderate amount of unknowns with a team that can collaboratively turn unknowns into ‘ knowns ’ in a timely manner .
3 . Have a product owner from the business who is committed to defining what is required and accepting the outcome of the work undertaken .
4 . Be able to implement a team focused on a joint outcome that is independent of organisation structure or operating model . A team that is empowered and responsible for the outcome . Use agile tools to support the process including : requirements management , testing and migration .
To futureproof your IM investment , you need to ensure that your organisation ’ s solution can change as and when required . An agile delivery approach can certainly help you do this by focusing on the most important aspects of your IM program , ensuring that when change does occur , the impact to existing reports , code and processes is minimal or non-existent .
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