Topic

How to ensure business and technical people are working together daily throughout the project - an Agile Principle

Response

The principle is:

Ensuring business people and technical people are WORKING TOGETHER daily throughout the project is a critical success factors for agile teams.

Business people know a lot about business development, customers and marketplace dynamics, and less about technology, software or process engineering. Technical people know a lot about technology, software or process engineering, but less about business development, customers and marketplace dynamics. In essence they talk two different languages and live in what may appear to be very different worlds. A cross-disciplined or cross-functional team requires planning.

By working together on a common set of business goals; through colocation the two teams over time build up a better understanding of each others fields of expertise and gain a greater appreciation of their individual challenges, opportunities and key influencers.

Once the agile team is formed their collaboration on the same key results establishes an environment that allows one group to learn about the others. This increases decision-making, increases the Agile team’s overall problem solving ability and dramatically reduces everyones dependancy on detailed written material. Furthermore, it enables a fresh perspective to be taken on solving long-term challenges.

Co-ownership, co-location, co-production means, they embark on solving challenges together through joint analysis. This results in less time being required to produce detailed documentation, which always run the risk of being misinterpreted as requirements are translated into solutions

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