3 important roles we train for:

Initiating the Software Project:

Firstly, bAnalyst has to work with the stakeholders or key business partners to study the software development and operations and identify preliminary issues pertaining to the problem. Then it is decided whether to fund the software development project or not. If decided to fund the software development project then the next step is to formulate and communicate the vision for the project and plan road-map of the project meetings with key stakeholders and business executives.

Next step is brainstorming sessions, perform gap analysis and look into the problem at different angles. There needs to be prepared documentation of both the functional and nonfunctional requirements. One of the most important parts of the Business Analysis process is to avoid the “Unnecessary” which saves time and money.




Spelling out the Details of the Software Development Project:

After kicking off the project, the second step is to elaborate all the details and requirements to the implementation team and help them understand the technical aspects of the solution.

Based on the requirements and details the following is created:

Prototype

Use Cases

Wireframes

Mockups

Screens

SRS (System Requirements Specification)

BRD (Business Requirements Documents)

Data or Process Models (for large projects)




When the technical team has all the details about what is to be designed and starts implementing the software development solution, and the stakeholders and business executives are signed off, bAnalyst’s role shifts from an active one to reactive one.

Supporting the implementation of the Software Development Project:

BA’s are not involved directly in this phase. Now, BA’s role is just to support the implementation process unless any new requirement occurs in between the process.

After the implementation has been done, the active role of bAnalyst begins again. BA conducts functional and usability testing of the implemented software development solution and recommends corrective and preventive actions, if necessary. BA works with stakeholders to validate the requirements via reviews, walkthroughs and play acting.

During the implementation process if new needs or requirements occur, the bAnalyst may initiate new process and then this cycle will repeats.

How Agile Is Your Team?

If you feel like technological disruption is forcing you to move at warp speed to keep your business going, you’re not alone. The speed of technological change and the associated availability of key skills are two of the top concerns of global CEOs.

To adapt, survive and thrive in this vortex of change, you need to build an agile organization that acts as an ever-evolving organism rather than a rigid machine.

Led by a shared vision and purpose, agile organizations are supported by a dynamic project-based structure and fueled by empowered, motivated teams. These teams come together fluidly to work on a project, evolve as the project changes and dismantle to form new teams as the project wraps up.

Unfortunately, static team structures are still the reality for many organizations, especially those that are not digitally native.

The Obsolete Static Team

I started my career as a product designer at Microsoft’s Office group, which was organized into individual teams for different applications. Teams only changed by hiring new people, often from other internal teams, leading to internal competition for resources.

There was no system of forming dynamic teams around projects. It was up to individual team members to figure out what team would provide the best opportunities for their careers. The projects might have been agile, but the teams were not. As a result, a lot of time was wasted on internal politics, products ended up quite siloed and solutions were likely less innovative.

When these static teams are faced with ambiguous projects, they lack the skills, information and even influence to be effective.

The Dynamic Team: Thriving In Ambiguity

Imagine you work for a consumer product company. The company’s planning process regularly identifies different strategic opportunities to pursue and outcomes the company wants to achieve without prescribing solutions to get there.

Based on the skills required for these projects and individual availability, they assemble a team to come up with solutions on a predefined timeline. As the path to the outcome becomes clearer, new team members with different skills get assigned to the project. Others might get pulled off to work on something else.

Team members expect this ambiguity and welcome the opportunity for diverse work experiences. This is a far more agile team and it thrives in the ambiguity of creative work.

How To Adopt An Agile Team-Forming Strategy

Here are three steps to building up the structural, cultural and individual foundations your company needs to transition to a more agile organization:

1. Dynamically Allocate Team Members Based On The Needs Of The Project

When selecting the right project team, there are three aspects of the outcome that need to be optimized: efficiency, quality and skill development.

• Efficiency is about how many people you can afford to put on the team and how much time they can work to still be profitable.

• Quality is about how well you’re matching peoples’ current skills and experience to the required outcome.

• Skill development is about matching team members’ needs and their desire for growth to skills that can be gained in a new project.

When you account for skill development in project planning, you not only ensure that your workforce remains competitive, you also strengthen employee loyalty, improve their performance and reduce turnover.

This knowledge is often only in their manager’s head. Making this institutional knowledge requires a system that maps the skills of your existing team members, tracks their growth over time and periodically reevaluates the team in the context of the current state of projects.

2. Establish Transparency At Every Level To Empower Project Teams To Self-Govern 

In an agile work environment, teams have the freedom to define how they work. To be successful, these autonomous teams need to clearly understand what success looks like for the project. Success, then, must be defined as a measurable outcome.

There are many possible solutions to an outcome, but it should be up to the team to decide which is the best one. A structure that embraces transparency in tracking progress towards the outcome in real-time allows you to course correct and potentially reallocate people when needed.

To empower your team to self-govern, encourage and develop an entrepreneurial mindset among your team members, and provide a transparent system so everyone knows what the current status is regarding budget and quality.

If people understand the desired outcome and have access to the project status, they can adjust their own work to meet the changing demands of their projects and the organization as a whole.

3. Evolve The Skills Of Your People To Make The Team Agile-Proof 

In a traditional organizational structure, you most likely work with people within your own discipline. When teams are formed dynamically, they bring together the best combination of disciplines needed for the outcome.

People need to develop a foundation of broader knowledge to collaborate well in this structure. Sally may be an engineer, but since she will be collaborating with colleagues in a multidisciplinary team, she also needs to know the basics of marketing, user research and project management.

As outcomes become more ambiguous, soft skills like communication, decision making, conflict resolution and collaboration will become as important as software development and data science. In fact, 91% of CEOs say a third of corporate training budgets are dedicated to developing them.

If you start tracking how the team is performing per project, it will help determine which soft skills are required, which skills to develop and even which combination of team members leads to less than optimal results.

We can reach super agility by not just changing the work, but also by changing how teams work. Many of the tools we use to plan our projects and teams today support this shift, as long as they are supported by these agile team-forming strategies.

If you feel like technological disruption is forcing you to move at warp speed to keep your business going, you’re not alone. The speed of technological change and the associated availability of key skills are two of the top concerns of global CEOs, according to .

To adapt, survive and thrive in this vortex of change, you need to build an agile organization that acts as an ever-evolving organism rather than a rigid machine.

Led by a shared vision and purpose, agile organizations are supported by a dynamic project-based structure and fueled by empowered, motivated teams. These teams come together fluidly to work on a project, evolve as the project changes and dismantle to form new teams as the project wraps up.

Unfortunately, static team structures are still the reality for many organizations, especially those that are not digitally native.

8 Keys to Transforming into a High-Performance Agile Team

In this age of digital transformation, every organization is working to build teams that produce predictable outcomes and deliver software that meets user demands and timelines. Following agile methodologies and practices has become the norm for such teams to meet these business requirements. Every business stakeholder expects their teams to exhibit high performance and frequently release working software to production. But following an agile process alone will not guarantee your teams will be high performers. Teams undergo various challenges while transforming into a highly productive team. Let’s look at the areas where teams generally struggle in adopting agile principles and the typical root causes for those struggles, as well as the behaviors that can help drive teams toward greater success.

Where and Why Agile Teams Struggle

There are many areas where agile teams struggle while working to become high-performance teams. Issues with a change in culture, effectively utilizing individuals’ expertise and experiences, adopting to new ways of working, socializing and collaborating with stakeholders, and understanding the business can all be challenging.

Let’s look into each of these areas in more detail.

Adopting New Tools and Practices

With the evolution of agility in software development activities, new tools and practices are necessary for efficiency. Application lifecycle management (ALM) tools such as JIRA and Rally, continuous integration (CI) tools such as Jenkins and Bamboo, distributed software configuration management (CM) tools such as Git and GitHub, and lightweight test automation tools such as Selenium and JUnit all become critical. New practices such as test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), and DevOps also are introduced during this transformation. A lack of formal training and hands-on experience with these agile tools and practices will often result in a team that struggles to meet its commitments and to reach its full potential.

Incorporating Agile Testing and Automation

Teams often struggle with how to build and test software in concert, as they are used to following traditional testing practices that often start testing after code is frozen and automation is only done as an afterthought. But following these traditional practices results in delayed feedback to the developers about the quality of their code, as testing gets deferred to subsequent iterations. It can also lead to delays in deploying tested features into downstream test environments.

Decomposing Epics into User Stories and Considering Acceptance Criteria

One of the most important activities in agile planning is properly decomposing epics into user stories and estimating their size. Teams often lack the focus and ability to scrutinize requirements from a user-centric perspective, resulting in ambiguous user stories that are difficult to properly implement and test within the time the team planned for.

Dealing with Cultural Transformation

While teams are doing their best to transform to agile, there are organizational and cultural aspects that impact their performance, such as resolving dependencies with other teams in the same program or portfolio, new release management processes that must be followed, coordination with multiple stakeholders on priorities and feedback, and learning new communication and interaction channels. Not addressing these cultural challenges often results in pseudo-agile behavior where agile principles are followed in name only.

Being Operationally Disciplined

Being operationally disciplined means adhering to a set of well-defined, proven, and well-thought-out processes and consistently performing them correctly. In agile, this means conducting agile ceremonies diligently, such as having periodic meetings and discussions with stakeholders for planning, user acceptance and sprint reviews, sprint retrospectives, team brainstorming sessions, and daily Scrum meetings. These collaborative activities demand a lot of commitment and discipline from the team members in order for them to be productive.

Understanding the Business Purpose

It is very important for every member of the team to understand the business purpose of what they are working on and what impact new features will have on the users of their software. Often, the tendency of a new agile team is to focus only on their individual software component or feature, the technical details in developing it, or the immediate delivery need, while ignoring the bigger picture of the project. This results in teams that veer off track, away from customer value and needs.

Having an Encouraging Atmosphere

Agile is not only about following certain practices and ceremonies or using automated tools and technologies to speed software releases. It also demands that teams have no fear of failure, can deal with lots of unknowns, and can manage and embrace conflicts. It is also about the ability to try out innovative ideas, experiment frequently, and fail fast if failure is going to happen. Lack of having a safe environment will lead to demotivated individuals who are afraid to try new practices and processes and will not produce innovative solutions.

Becoming a High-Performance Team

While coaching helps get teams on the right path, it’s the team’s responsibility to embrace agile principles and sustain the efficiency in their activities and effectiveness in their outcome. I have found that the following eight practices help a team become high performers.

1.  Aligning with Leadership Regularly

Agile teams should have regular interactions with the program sponsors or leadership and have a common understanding of project goals. Teams should understand their role in addressing the business objectives, and the entire team should speak with a “one-voice” approach when communicating with stakeholders. If leadership asks the team to act in a way that does not align with agile principles, it is incumbent upon the team to respond in a unified voice that what is being asked isn’t acceptable agile behavior.

2.  Sharing Knowledge and Experiences

Sharing new knowledge and experiences across all teams is critical to getting your entire organization up to speed as fast as possible. By actively participating in team product demonstrations, showcases, and established agile communities of practice, organizational knowledge grows much quicker than if each team attempts to learn everything on its own. Sharing experiences frequently also builds relationships among teams and increases the likelihood of effective collaboration.

3.  Adopting Test-Driven Development and Behavior-Driven Development

TDD is a development practice in which low-level unit tests are used to drive successful software implementation. BDD and ATDD (acceptance test-driven development) are similar practices for specifying expected software behavior for stories and use cases using tests. All allow the business, testers, and developers to collaborate on understanding the requirements and properly building and testing the right functionality. Embedding these practices into day-to-day activities of the team not only fortifies the quality of deliverables, but helps the team reduce rework and communicate what needs to be done more clearly.

4.  Defining User Stories and Requirements

The effective decomposition of epics into appropriate user stories is one of the most important activities for agile development. This not only helps provide clarity to the agile team on the requirements, but also aids them in estimating their work properly. A proven practice for effectively breaking down epics is to use a Three Amigos approach, where representatives from the business, development, and testing have collective conversations on deriving the behavioral aspects and acceptance criteria for every user story. Your entire team should also participate in backlog grooming sessions to share their ideas and define the guidelines for a definition of “done” to determine when a user story is ready to be picked up for development.

5.  Participating in Organizational Change Management

When an organization is undergoing transformational change, it is not only the responsibility of the management, but also the individual teams, to contribute positively to the process. Teams should consistently demonstrate their commitment toward achieving business goals through continuous collaboration with business stakeholders while helping to instill a high-performing agile culture in their team and overall organization. A key aspect of this commitment is delivery of promised functionality during each sprint.

6.  Practicing Good Collaboration and Communication

Achieving high performance within the team and software delivery process without strong communication and collaboration will be very difficult. Team must exhibit the behavioral aspects of discipline, close collaboration, and commitment with stakeholders during iteration planning, and be open to feedback during review and retrospective meetings. Availability of high-end infrastructure, such as video conferencing, messaging systems, and other collaboration tools, at the team’s workplace will help distributed teams effectively collaborate and communicate.

7.  Having Systems Thinking and Mindfulness

It’s very important that each team has a complete picture of the project and program within which they are working. To achieve this, teams should develop a deep understanding of business domain, business rules, enterprise architecture, and applications of client organization and align this knowledge with the software modules they are working on. As much as possible, teams should not focus on optimizing their specific aspects of a larger program, but help the entire program optimize its efficiency.

8.  Generating a Positive and Energizing Work Culture within the Team

If team members are not open with each other and with their stakeholders, there will be very little trust. Team members that trust others, are open-minded to feedback and suggestions, are cheerful, and encourage others will make it easier for all to express and articulate new ideas. These attributes can be spread among team members through activities such as discussions without agendas (e.g., lean coffee), celebrating small achievements, and constant inspiration from leadership.

Making Agile Really Work for Your Team

When transitioning to agile, teams undergo training on whatever methodology they’ll be adopting, such as Scrum, kanban, or Extreme Programming. However, they are often not given as much help understanding the interpersonal dynamics necessary for agile to be successful. This is how teams fall into the habit of agile antipatterns. To become a successful, high-performance agile team, it’s important to identify and act on any interpersonal or cultural issues that may be standing in the way of true agility. By adopting the eight practices outlined above, your agile team can realize the benefits of improved communication, more frequent software releases, happier customers, and overall higher performance.

If you are looking to build your next (or first) mobile app and need help with one or more of these steps, you’re in luck! The moPharma Group welcomes app owners at any stage in this process. Whether you are a startup or Fortune 50 company, we have the team and knowledge needed to deliver a fantastic mobile app. Please don’t hesitate to write us today.