Information and Methods DSDM Atern (2) tutorial (Trần Xuân Trường)

2. A number of problems (4 in total) could have had a major impact upon the tight delivery deadlines. What were these problems? How did the project team use DSDM to help overcome these problems?

Answer :

According case-study, these problems are :

1. The diverse range of stakeholders presented major challenges.Not only were there 12 of them, drawn from both the public and the private sector, but they had very different ways of working and perceptions of risk.
2. The project was impacted by a major office move and complete change of team by one of the key project stakeholders around the time the system was due to go live.
3. Resistance to the ‘iterative’ and ‘appropriate level of rigour’ approach of DSDM for the project had to be overcome.
4. The requirements for a major part of the system were more complex than first thought and were changing as part of the review of the regulations.

As we know DSDM Atern principles 3 "Collaborate" encourages increased understanding, greater speed and shared ownership which enable teams to perform at a level that exceeds the sum of their parts. With problem 1, It's help the project team DSDM’s focus on collaboration, facilitation and stakeholder engagement helped ensure that everyone worked together and any issues were dealt with quickly.

With problem 2, the project team follow DSDM Atern principles 6 "Develop Iteratively" to help them to cope with changing requirements and personnel.Change is inevitable, It's allows for change and harnesses its benefits. Within the constraints of time and cost, change is actively encouraged in order to evolve the most appropriate solution. Atern uses iteration and constant review to make sure that what is being developed is what the business really needs.

The project team need to deliver the project on time however DSDM presented cultural difficulties for one of the key stakeholders, The project team intergrate DSDM Atern into an existing Prince2 Environment in order to help them to quickly establish or enable their own agile capability and overcome resistance to the ‘iterative’ and ‘appropriate level of rigour’ approach of DSDM for the project.

And final problem, The project team realised that the only sensible time for this to go live was 1st September, at the time only 3 months away. So with DSDM Atern principles 1 "Focus on the business need", it's help them to overriding project goal, which is to deliver what the business needs it to deliver, when it needs to be delivered by using MoSCoW prioritisation. Using this techniques it became clear that this functionality was a ‘should have’ rather than ‘must have’ for delivery and so was re-scheduled for the following year.

DSDM Atern – tutorial 1 (Trần Xuân Trường)

2. Principle 2: Deliver on time

In order to fulfil on-time delivery principle Atern teams need to : 

• ·         Use timebox approach
• ·         Focus on business priorities
• ·         Always hit deadlines.

Timeboxing the work of projects is a powerful practice which truly helps facilitate on-time delivery. A timebox is a fixed period of time at the end of which one or more deliverables have been completed. What we are focusing on here is the completion of deliverables by the exact deadlines and a timebox is only successfully achieved by then. Timeboxing takes advantages of iterative development approach as it breaks down the project into small fixed periods of time, usually two and four weeks which is a reasonable time span for development team to meet the objective of that timebox. Longer timeboxes, say 6 weeks, usually would cause the team to lose focus and it is logical and common sense that short timeboxes always push development team into hard working mode to fulfil the requirements agreed on at the beginning of the timebox.

On top of that, there is this Daily Standup part in all timeboxes in which development team together shares information on what each member has been doing to achieve the timebox’s objective and what he  will be doing till the next standup , as well as any problems he has been having that prevents him or the team from achieving the objective. Daily Standups would help identify problems earlier, so that the development team can fix them in early stage, save time and do not miss the deadlines.

DSDM pratice uses MoSCoW prioritisation for business priorities, which also help keep product deliveries on time.  As stated in the MoSCoW rules, the total effort invested in Must Haves should not above 60%, so it makes sure that development team can at least guarantee to deliver those Must Haves and present a usable product on time. Even if the team do both Must Haves and Should Haves, the total effort is still no more than 80%. We only use 80% of the development time to bring out a fine usable product, therefore we definitely deliver the product on time.

In conclustion, the combination of timeboxing and reasonable MoSCoW prioritisation allows the development team to predict the time of deliveries and always hit deadlines.

DSDM Atern – tutorial 1 (Nguyễn Quang Hiệp & Nguyễn Năng Chung)

Focus on the Business need

Explain what is meant by the term ‘Business case’. Why is the business case so important when delivering a system within a Rapid Application Development environment?

The term "Business case" is really means the business proposal. It helps us know about project overview, strategic goal, current situation and problem, critical assumption and constraints, analysis of option and recommendation, preliminary project requirement, potential risk of the project. When we have project description with strategic goal and we can confirm time to do project, functions, technology will use and give requirements for each group the project will very clear."Business case" giving exactly all of the elements need when we do the project. Projects requirement clear, easy to divide small project, know how much resources to divide group to do project. "Business case" is necessary and important when delivering a system within a rapid application development environment.