Agile Release Planning

AGILE DELIVERY FRAMEWORK

Agile Delivery Framework CIS 443: Agile Project Management

Running Head: AGILE DELIVERY FRAMEWORK

8

AGILE DELIVERY FRAMEWORK

E-Commerce Website and Mobile Application Project

Introduction

The Agile Delivery Framework mostly moves from the initiation phase which involves getting to understand the needs of customers and stakeholders achieved by proper planning with the innovators and customers, up to execution of processes iteratively, iterative learning, improving and also adapting to the sprints of success. According to research, impatience together with systems of business that are poorly functioning, old technology and long lead times has made many agencies to implement Agile solutions to the requirements of most of the projects (Uludağ et al, 2017).

In addition, agile delivery framework is an approach that is customer-centric in nature that defines, builds and releases valuable services and products continuously to necessary users and customers (Uludağ et al, 2017). A specific assessment supports each core competency enabling easy proficiency assessment by the enterprises for instance, they work together with recommended improvement opportunities to increase the assessment accuracy.

The following figure shows a project schedule for the Agile Delivery Framework:

Figure 1: Agile Delivery Framework project plan

Figure 1: Agile Delivery Framework project plan

Reason why Agile Delivery Framework is used

Business Agility achievement helps companies in rapid delivering of innovative services and products. Balancing the execution focus by companies with a customer focus ensures that the right product solutions are being created for the right customers at a convenient time. The capabilities above are very important, and they are vital in opportunity creation for the immediate leadership in terms of market and services provided that has been sustained (Srivastava et al, 2017).

The following are the main dimensions of agile delivery framework.

· The continuous delivery pipeline and DevOps: this involves foundation creation that enables companies to release value at the most convenient time to the demands of the market and customers.

· Design thinking and customer centricity: customer centricity gathers customers at the central point of every decision by the use of design thinking to make sure that the product can be sustained, desired, achievable and viable.

· Develop on Cadence: this helps in varying inherent management in product development.

Design Thinking and Customer Centricity

Customer centricity is an attitude and ways in which activities associated with the business are conducted and focus on engagement creation that are more positive in nature as a customer experiences the services and products the company provides. A business that supports customer centricity but increases engagement of employees, creates greater profits, and thoroughly satisfying the needs of customers. Customer-centric nonprofits and governments are involved in sustainability, alignment and the resilience that is required in mission fulfilment (Uludağ et al, 2017). Customer Centricity

When a decision is made by a company that supports customer centricity, effects of what has been decided by them on the end users at the end is put into consideration. The team is then motivated to (Ambler & Lines, 2016):

· Focus on customers: in businesses that support customer centricity, segmentation of users and the market are used in focus and alignment of the organization specifically on the segments of the users that has been targeted.

· Think and feel like customers: organizations supporting customer centricity organizations are recognizes the feelings of its customers and endeavors to view the rest of the world from the point of view of their customers.

· Understand the needs of customers: organizations that entail customer centricity move higher than just listening to a customer who are just after stories or features. Instead, achievement of their goal should be their priority while investing the time in identifying needs of customers and building products that address these needs.

· Create customer lifetime value: companies that entail customer centricity focus on total relationship rather than just moving beyond transactional mentality with customers over the solution’s natural life. Creation of customer value for the enterprises is therefore enabled by the resulting in a customer relationship that will be in existence for a long time, most cases in ways that were not anticipated during the first release of the product.

· Build whole product solutions: organizations that focus on customer centricity, design a product solution that is complete according to the needs of the users, making sure that the earlier experiences and those that have been in existence for a long time for the customers is done to maximum level possible and is evolving as required.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is integral to customer-centric organizations. The main activities of design thinking include the following:

1. The right solution designing that makes sure that it is technically doable.

2. Understanding the problem to be solved that hence involves insight provision into the benefits and requirements of a solution that is desired by the customers.

3. Making sure the solution can be sustained and viable through management and understanding of the economics of the solution.

The project involves the following phases (Ambler & Lines, 2016);

· Planning

· System and requirements analysis

· System design

· System development

· System implementation

· System testing

· System deployment

· System maintenance

This framework used a more modified life cycle in representing the iterative and also flexible nature of agile in a better way.

· Activities and processes: specific project processes to be followed can be outlined by each of the frameworks, therefore different projects will have better products if different frameworks are used.

· Checklists, templates, and other tools: the information needed in planning the project more effectively is contained in the framework of the project especially from the recommendation on resources, tasks and activities on project documents drafting.

The Scrum framework

To clearly explain an iterative approach in this project, this agile framework will be used in managing the project. Furthermore, according to this framework, a whole project is broken down into sprints which lasts for at least a month. At the end of each sprint, a draft or workable version is delivered for the final project deliverable. The short iterations in this framework enables the agile project team to deliver a continuous final project’s working version.

In addition, scrum framework is more flexible hence can be used in any industry conducting complex projects, but it performs best when the project results in concrete products and not just a service.

This framework is flexible and lightweight because of the following three main pillars:

· Adaptation

· Transparency

· Inspection

Agile project team

This team refers to the project team that is assigned to an Agile project and may involve a group of freelancers, contractors, or employees in charge of project execution. Furthermore, since we are using a Scrum framework, the Agile project team must have a product owner and a Scrum master (project manager). The latter oversees collaboration facilitation, daily meetings organization and overseeing the project. In addition, more roles and responsibilities for the Agile project team are discussed below (McHugh et al, 2011):

· Development team: this the Scrum project team. In addition, it involves a group of persons with various functional expertise and they work towards a common goal and they are also self-organized. Development team also includes all persons that responsible for designing, producing, testing and releasing of the final product solution.

· Product owner: this is the team member in charge of customer’s best interest representation. The product owner has a higher authority over the final solution of the project. This team member’s role is also to make sure that there is an understanding and achievement of functionality, requirements and priorities of the project.

· Scrum master/project manager: the difference between a scrum master and a project manager is that the former has to focus on being a servant leader. In addition, roles of the project manager in most cases include the Scrum master’s position. On the other hand, these responsibilities can be assigned to any team member who has the necessary skills. Furthermore, it is not mandatory for the project manager to be from an Information technology field, however they should have a basic knowledge on the technical aspects which will help them have a better understanding of the technical challenges, overall solution and other related project risks.

· Scrum team: the structure of this team includes the Scrum master, product owner and development team (McHugh et al, 2011).

In Agile delivery framework, stories, short descriptions of a small piece of desired functionality, are very important since they are used to define the behavior of the system in Agile. Each story has an intention of enabling the process of implementing small, vertical slice of the behavior of the system that supports development that is incremental in nature. In addition, stories provides more information for both technical and business people mostly to understand the intention. Stories of the users are main ways of expressing the functionality that is needed (McHugh et al, 2011).

Examples of stories include personas describing specific features of representative users that helps the team in better understanding of the end user which could be a device or system such as a transaction server for this project (McHugh et al, 2011). Another example of stories may involve infrastructure building or improving and running tasks that need human interaction.

Reference

McHugh, O., Conboy, K., & Lang, M. 2011. Agile practices: The impact on trust in software project teams. Ieee Software, 29(3), 71-76.

Ambler, S. W., & Lines, M. 2016, January. The disciplined agile process decision framework. In International Conference on Software Quality (pp. 3-14). Springer, Cham.

Srivastava, A., Bhardwaj, S., & Saraswat, S. 2017, May. SCRUM model for agile methodology. In 2017 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA) (pp. 864-869). IEEE.

Uludağ, Ö., Kleehaus, M., Xu, X., & Matthes, F. 2017, October. Investigating the role of architects in scaling agile frameworks. In 2017 IEEE 21st International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC) (pp. 123-132). IEEE.