Agile Method Flashcards
What is McKinsey Solutions ?
McKinsey Solutions is a suite of software, proprietary data, and analytics based services that are complementary to traditional consulting.
Solutions are complementary assets to our traditional consulting service, fully integrated in a McKinsey function or industry Practice.
CASE STUDY: who builds the tallest tower with spaghettis?
First iteration
- How have you organized yourselves ?
- Who was doing what?
- What would you change as a result of seeing the video?
Second iteration
- What changes did you make to your process as a result of seeing the video? What were the results?
- How did you interact?
- Was the switch easy? Hard?
- What was the secret of your success?
- What are we learning when faced with adaptive complex challenges? How did you perform under pressure?
What is the lesson #1 that we get from this experiment ?
Priorities are continuously re-evaluated to ensure client centricity.
What is the lesson #2?
Focus on deploying little and deploying early to realize value early and then iterating.
What is the lesson #3 ?
Shift you mental model of how to lead your teams.
From hierarchichal to a flat organization system, this results in an increase of morale accross members of the team. The feeling of importance is much greater when we are treated as equal rather than an element at the bottom of the pyramid.
Agile vs Waterfall
What are the conditions that are favorable for a waterfall strategy ?
- If we know already specifically what we want (eg: we want a robot that can sing)
- that the time to market this product isn’t an issue (eg: no competitors that can take the market before us)
The value drive approach of Agile method
Being Agile is all about iterations i.e. come up with a plan, develop this specific plan, feedback on what was achieved difficulties encountered then define a new plan (…). Since the process is iterative the time horizon of each iteration are shortened so that we can get feedback asap. But have enough time also to develop the idea.
A more detailed version of the Agile Method
What is the Agile manifesto and why was it created ?
In 2001 an alliance of sotfware experts seeking to improve the issues IT development faced laid down a simple manifesto …
How to choose between agile and waterfall ?
Use Agile development to reduce the risk of not delivering value to the customer, and coping with uncertainty.
The more the outcome of the project is unknown the more relevant Agile approach becomes. Since we can’t estimate the budget and time, we should deliver to the client what was done with this value.
What is a Minimum Viable Product ?
How to build a Minimum Viable Product ?
Here again we should follow an iterative process:
- Come up with an idea
- Implement the idea
- Measure what is measurable to evaluate the success of this idea
- Learn from those KPI’s and improve the initial idea
How to come up with good ideas?
We need to write good hypothesis
I believe [target market] will [do this action / use this solution] for [this reason].
CASE STUDY: Apple’s iPod
Hyptohesis: (People will pay to download music to listen to in public) = PROFIT
Assumption A - Risky Assumption
Assumption B - Validated by Napster
Assumption C - Validated by Walkman
We need to test Assumption A !
CASE STUDY: Zappos
“We believe that customer service shouldn’t be just a department; it should be the entire company.” Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
Hypothesis: (people will buy for shoes online) = PROFIT
What did Zappos do ?
Step 1: Build a rather rudimentary web page showing pictures the founder had taken of shoes in local stores and there prices.
Step 2: Drive Traffic, run adword campaign.
Step 3: Measure the traffic.
Step 1bis: Learn from these data and develop a new site.
Tools to help you in agile project management journey
- Slack
- Trello
- Excel
- Realtime Board
