This content originally appeared in TDWI. TDWI members can see the original here.
With so many teams “going agile,” it’s important for your BI team to keep a few things in mind that will help your agile transformation go more smoothly. This series, “10 Mistakes to Avoid In an Agile BI Transformation”, will show you how to prevent the most common pitfalls I’ve encountered in my experience as an Agile Coach.
Don’t let the idea of being flexible and fast distract you from your highest priority. Make sure you leverage the feedback loops inherent in your agile framework to maintain focus on your goal.
The scrum framework requires several feedback loops, from daily stand-ups where teammates can request help and communicate to stay on track to a product review with the customer and a retrospective at the end of each short sprint to reflect on what got in the way of meeting this goal.
The kanban framework provides good data on how long each piece of value took to complete, where the bottlenecks are in the delivery process, when the team violates its WIP limits, and the overall lead time from customer request to delivery of value.
A key aspect of all agile approaches is to focus on delivering high-quality work that does not have to come back to the delivery team to be fixed once it’s in production. Therefore, standard quality metrics on test failures as well as production bugs and their severity are also important to agile teams.
This practice is all about the data, which is something BI teams can really get behind! Agile teams should build data collection into their processes so they can understand how often a problem happens, how long it takes to resolve it, and how much of an impact it has on the flow of value to customers.
[…] Read Mistake #7: Ignoring Agile Feedback Loops […]