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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.
Once your feedback loops have identified the challenges and bottlenecks you face as a team, it’s time to prioritize them and get them into your team’s work backlog alongside customer-facing deliverables. The backlog is an agile term for your team’s prioritized list of small pieces of value to deliver.
An easy example most teams discover early on is the inevitable bottleneck that occurs when a lot of work needs to be tested all at once. Options to reduce the bottleneck going forward could include automation, enhanced agile testing skills, or applying agile practices that pull quality forward in the delivery cycle.
One team might decide the first step is to try pair programming to reduce defects and make a plan to begin that practice with the next item in the backlog. They might be also ready for test automation and decide to “slow down to speed up” by implementing an automation tool before working on the next backlog item. Another team might decide they want to address this issue at the beginning of their next project because it would be too disruptive to make these improvements for the current one. Either way, each team has created a plan and made improvements a priority within the backlog.
Don’t leave improvements to your free time. Decide where they fit best in your upcoming backlog and make a commitment to address them at the right time.
[…] Read Mistake #8: Not Including Process Improvements in the Team’s Work Backlog […]