Futureproofing your IM investment

Information management (IM) and business intelligence (BI) projects are continuing to grow in popularity, with more organisations planning to make the most of the data they hold to give them a competitive edge.

With a traditional SDLC or waterfall approach to development, you must gather all of your requirements upfront and then you commence the development cycle. That cycle could take many months to complete, by which time your business has changed fundamentally and those requirements no longer meet the needs of the business. You’re delivered a solution that is out-dated even before it goes live.

An agile delivery approach, however, focuses on adaptability and enables your development team/s to start delivering value to the business even before the requirements are complete. It focuses your team/s in on what is most important now and keeps you working with this critical view in mind. Over a two- or three-week development sprint, you can release code to the business that fulfils a particular requirement - immediate, regular, incremental value.

An agile IM approach is about making the complex simple; stripping back to bare minimum with a singular goal in mind. With agile IM, the goal is what’s important, not the documentation and bureaucracy. Agile IM by its pure nature is a highly adaptive approach; it’s light on process and heavy on outcome.

So, as your business requirements change, so too does the focus of your development teams. Critical to agile IM success is the connection between the business and IT. A business or product owner is incorporated into the team to ensure that the business’s needs are central to the work being undertaken.

In short, to make agile IM successful, you must …

1. Be open to change and have a desire to do things differently. You must place all value on the outcome, not on the process to get there. Change the approach to work estimation and constantly reassess and learn. Change the requirements management approach, use business stories to scope the work. Project governance can be improved through agile methods.

2. Have the right problem with a moderate amount of unknowns with a team that can collaboratively turn unknowns into ‘knowns’ in a timely manner.

3. Have a product owner from the business who is committed to defining what is required and accepting the outcome of the work undertaken.

4. Be able to implement a team focused on a joint outcome that is independent of organisation structure or operating model. A team that is empowered and responsible for the outcome. Use agile tools to support the process including: requirements management, testing and migration.

To futureproof your IM investment, you need to ensure that your organisation’s solution can change as and when required. An agile delivery approach can certainly help you do this by focusing on the most important aspects of your IM program, ensuring that when change does occur, the impact to existing reports, code and processes is minimal or non-existent.