2021-02-26: Lean Startup Method and Agile for Initial Project Planning (Pafford)
Date: Friday, Feb 26, 2021
Speaker: Mike Pafford, Past Chesapeake Chapter President
Presentation: The INCOSE Chesapeake Chapter recently hosted member Mike Pafford, Past Chesapeake Chapter President, to provide a live tutorial covering the topic of using Lean Startup and Agile Methods in performing Initial Project Planning activities. Mike is a prolific speaker as well as educator on Systems Engineering and Program Management subjects. Mike delivered a live online half-day tutorial that explored various real world examples of initial project standup. Mike walked through process steps for initial project planning while illustrating the application of step by step techniques.
The approach Mike advocated is to bring together project planners at the decision-making level in one or more collaborative and facilitated, “IPP Meetup Workshops”. The primary outcome of these IPP Meetup Workshops is a set of consensus Project Focus Mechanisms including:
Project Title and Purpose Statements,
Project Vision (in the form of a Project Vision Board Extended (PVBE)),
Project Stakeholder Groups List (aka Personas List),
Example Stakeholder Group Details (aka Example Persona Templates),
Project Target Groups (i.e., Persona List and Details ‘binned’ into a smaller list of Common Target Groups), and
Initial Set of System-Level Capabilities.
The seven step Lean Startup Method yields a set of usable, validated capabilities by the end of the 7th step. This is more of a pre-decisional method to achieve the product/program backlog the Agile teams look forward to at the start of the program. Two programs were shown as success stories for this method. This method is a succinct set of steps that will provide the customer and other stakeholder confidence in the results that the real capabilities have been created. Mike did an excellent job in providing attendees a plethora of reference materials to include, references to detailed literature on the topic, open source tool-sets for use, an array of initial planning templates, and other materials. All which can be found at this Dropbox folder or at the Chapter’s [backup folder here].
Attendees left the tutorial well armed to attack their own projects.