1. Get involved in the process

All great application development and software is a result of a group effort, it’s absolutely critical for all technology leadership to support and nurture the process. As part of a strong, agile team, executive management needs to be involved actively and weigh in on key strategy decisions. In general, groups of people will always demonstrate better “decision making” results than individuals. Development and Product teams should strive to work completely exposed and as transparent as possible to all ends of the business.

In addition, the key role of having leadership team member play “devil’s advocate” is essential to avoid team degradation. Over time, an institutionalized group (typically when a team of devs work together for 12 months or more directly together) gets used to its devil’s advocates and learns to disregard their reasoning. As a result of this, its imperative to change up who wears the devil’s advocate hat, a healthy process of renewal that resides within solid agile best practices.

2. Engage and help nurture your product backlog

It’s equally important for management to know the product backlog, and be able to identify features that are yet to be developed. Involvement at the executive level to weigh in on prioritizing specific features according to business value (anticipated ROI) is important to ensure the team isn’t wasting enormous amounts time and effort in meetings discussing things and not actually doing it. The event you want to avoid is regrouping after two weeks with little accomplished, and bewildered faces from stakeholders as to why nothing has been done, and teams waiting on decisions.

The key is to ensure that leadership is engaged in the process each step of the way, so that product backlog decisions are done quickly and communicated outward to the group. A common pitfall of any agile team is having a stale backlog that no one sees or cares about.

3. Build trust with your team

One of the most critical duties of a great Agile leader is to build trust, on every level possible. Trust is an extremely fragile (and often short) state with an agile team, and often regaining trust from key product owners and stakeholders is much more difficult than building it. On occasion, broken trust can simply never be rebuilt; a leader needs to simply accept this fact and adjust accordingly.

When team members openly (or even worse, secretively) do not trust in each other to succeed, it often leads to disaster. Communication breaks down between the group, siloing people and feedback that is otherwise essential for the success of the product. When these kinds of situations occur, use retrospective time to open the flood gates and ensure that grievances are vetted and that a positive step can be taken to move forward for the benefit of the product, and the organization. Conflict can be a healthy thing sometimes.

For more great info on Agile practices in general, check out Mike Cohn’s blog at MountainGoatSoftware, or AgileBenchBlog.

]]> http://peculiariq.com/top-3-agile-leadership-lessons/feed/ 1 http://peculiariq.com/5-steps-for-building-great-web-applications/ http://peculiariq.com/5-steps-for-building-great-web-applications/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2014 22:09:27 +0000 http://peculiariq.com/?p=146 Step 1: Define your target user experience

An engaging UX/UI doesn’t happen “auto-magically”. It requires a well defined and focused strategy that is linked to company core business objectives, ideally straight from business unit leaders (Sales, Marketing, Content, etc.). It is critical to work collaboratively with internal leaders to identify quantifiable user experience goals to the core goals for the application, web or mobile. It’s all about helping the product owners achieve value through a better experience to end users.

Once this is completed, build out an execution roadmap to support it. This is essential in focusing the budget, time and daily activities that actually move the needle for business. A good user experience strategy includes:

• Solid competitive landscape analysis and trends
• Business Intelligence – Analytics and data (data is power)
• User research (end user personas, journey maps)
• MVP Feature prioritization
• Rapid Prototyping and Design Schemes

Step 2: Integrate User Insight

Remember, companies are not designing for employees. A designer or UX engineer who thinks they know their audience without having conducted any research is a recipe for product disaster. Different end user groups have different ways of using web applications in general, and have varying needs and preferences for using such software. Embrace them and they will embrace your app. Ignore them and they will, rightfully, ignore your app.

It’s critical to conduct planning sessions and user ‘journey’ mapping and personas to transform time spent on research into key insight, and drive user-centered thinking across your organization.

Step 3: Build for Innovation and Simplicity. Simple is always better.

End user expectations require more than the static UI from five years ago. Today’s modern digital experiences are highly interactive and personalized. They deliver information, at the right time, to the right device — whenever and wherever the user wants it.

Additionally, today’s experiences require the use of touch, gestures, motion, and proximity — all delivered in the most unobtrusive and intuitive means possible.  To be successful, the experience must be designed and evaluated according to the behaviors and habits of the end users.

Step 4: Fail fast and early

One of the most effective ways to your web app is engaging and successful is through prototyping and agile iterative testing. Rapid development prototypes allow product owners and development teams to simulate and evaluate the end-user experience without heavy investment, while also keeping product owner expectation setting in mind. Use prototypes to test early stages of all cycles of development from iteration 0 and beyond. It is a fast, low-risk method to assure you got it right before you build too much. Encourage your design team to fail early and fail fast. This nurtures creativity, innovation and progress. The critical element is to institutionalize the concept of rapid prototyping and testing with development teams, especially Dev, QA and Product teams.

Prototyping allows teams to visualize an experience, evaluate it, and iterate very quickly — to assure you got it right before you build.

Detailed design prototypes reduce the need for complex, written design specifications for developers (which can be ambiguous and out-dated material, anyway.)

Developers may be able to re-use HTML5 prototype code for the front-end design build-out, thus reducing time to market, reducing development cost, and reducing quality assurance testing.

Step 5: Collaborate with the extended team

Establishing quality processes and empowering cross-functional collaboration is key. Many non-functional components, like application speed and security, play a huge role in experience. It is important for product developers, business analysts, and technology leaders to work together to achieve the business goals.