Walking the Talk – Part 2

April 9, 2012

Back on the “trend” of applying Agile/Lean practices SEP learned from software development to “management” I submit another example. SEP is working on significant updates to its risk management, project management and status reporting. These areas deal a lot with communication and like everything else…people.

It really impressed me to find out our managers were applying SEP’s Envision discovery practice techniques to help understand what we needed to do. They worked with personas (see pictures for examples). One represented the client (Cam) and the other an SEP project manager (Pete).

The team is running through the Envision process doing measurable product goals, personas, story-boarding – whatever makes sense.

It is interesting to me that processes we have come to trust for software product development to ‘build the RIGHT product’ should and could be used to help us build better practices, tools, etc. It is a validation of the principles behind the approaches:

– Engage as many different types of stakeholders in the process as you can
– Concentrate on the end user and the end result
– Follow the value
– Be prepared to increment/learn
– Build it in paper first
– Stay visual