Chapter 5 Preparing for success

Question 1

What four elements ensure as successful SD team?

Instrumental Success Factors

Answer 1

1) Empowerment: allows day to day decisions to be made without waiting for decision points as long as they are within agreed boundaries
2) Team stability is highly important as the project does not rely on detailed documentation
3) Team skills: technical skills with good team communication
4) Team size: too small and there is a risk if someone leaves, too big (greater than 9) then its harder to communicate informally

Question 2

Business engagement is a key to success, what three elements are relied upon?

ISF

Answer 2

1) Commitment of business time throughout a project: should be agreed at the start of the project with an appreciation that the later phases of the project will require the low level business knowledge regarding requirements
2) Day to day collaboration involving business roles in the Iterative development phase. Active business engagement in a co-located environment is ideal (SD and business)
3) A supportive commercial/contractual arrangement: when contracts or SLAs exist with third parties the relationship must accommodate the evolution of the requirements without onerous change management overheads

Question 3

What benefits do Iterative Development, Integrated Testing and Incremental delivery offer?

ISF

Answer 3

iterative and incremental development approach is key both to the reduction of project risk and to the success of the project. Ensuring that individual elements of the solution are technically fit for purpose and meet the business need, builds confidence in the direction and the quality of the Evolving Solution. Linking Solution Increments together and testing them in order to prove they are still behaving as expected delivers an even higher level of confidence. On all types of project, testing early and often mitigates the risk of discovering deeply embedded faults.
Ensuring that testing is an integral part of development also opens up options for incremental deployment of the solution. This enables early ROI.
The concept of incremental delivery also carries down to individual Timeboxes, where each Timebox ideally delivers a complete potentially-deployable increment of the solution.Where the Business Ambassador can accept requirements/ user stories as “done” at the end of a Timebox, this provides tangible reassurance that a Solution Increment really meets business expectations,

Question 4

Why is Transparency important to DSDM projects?

ISF

Answer 4

DSDM is all about building confidence in the Evolving Solution, and in this way reducing the risks of the unknown or the invisible.
The value of building confidence through incremental delivery of business value, ideally demonstrating fully completed requirements/user stories (built, tested and accepted by the business) at the end of each Timebox,

Question 5

What tools can be used to promote Transparency?

ISF

Answer 5

1) Demonstrations/show and tells of time boxed deliverable

2) Team boards show where a team is at with a Timebox/project increment

Question 6

The Project Approach Questionnaire (PAQ) is used for?

ISF

Answer 6

The checklist assesses the key elements of the project that are setup for DSDM success and the risks to implementing the DSDM approach which must be addressed