Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Agile Manifesto:

Recently I read an article titled:



The article is an overview of Agile and how it may work within the Department of Defense and how it could be incorporated into a PMO setting.  Within the article there is a small part that mentions that the Air Force has tried Agile methodologies for a couple of small projects and they have come up with their own Agile Manifesto (here is part of it):


THE FIST MANIFESTO (Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny) 

System development projects should be done by the smallest possible team of talented people, using a short schedule, a small budget and mature technologies to deliver innovative solutions to urgent needs. 

This approach is called FIST: Fast, In-expensive, Simple, Tiny. 

Short timelines increase agility and stabilize requirements, technology, budgets and people. Short timelines also force accountability, ownership and learning. To maintain short timelines, a project must also exercise restraint over budgets, complexity and size. Increases to the project’s budget, complexity or size inevitably reduce its speed.

Accordingly, the FIST approach advocates the following: 

  • Minimize team size, maximize team talent.
  • Use schedules and budgets to constrain the design.
  • Insist on simplicity in organizations, processes and technologies.
  • Incentivize and reward under-runs.
  • Requirements must be achievable within short time horizons.
  • Designs must only include mature technologies.
  • Documents and meetings must be short. Have as many as necessary, as few as possible.
  • Delivering useful capabilities is the only measure of success.

4 comments:

  1. Ryan,

    There are several "killer" conditions. The first is "only mature technology."

    ReplyDelete
  2. What does "only mature technology" mean? A known system with easy and straight forward requirements?

    ReplyDelete
  3. In the defense world there are Technology Readiness Levels..

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

    Project with High technology readiness level (TRL) are "simple," many times butt simple. These are places where F.I.S.T excels.

    While Dan has some interesting ideas, he is not a Program Manager, nor works programs with developmental aspects.

    Kinda reminds me of the very early days of agile where a simple project was a raving success for XP and the people then extended that "win example" to every project on the planet.

    Glad to see he's putting boundaries on the success criteria. Those 8 conditions are rare in the DoD acquisition world.

    Dan's got great ideas, they just need feedback test of the "real world" to establish a the sweet spot for their applicability.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ryan,

    The bigger question which Dan doesn't answer is:
    From the population of all project in the domain (his is DoD USAF procurement) how many are candidates for the FIST approach?

    This is a question that needs to be asked for all suggested methods. This moves the discussion from anecdotal example to business decision making.

    ReplyDelete

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