Abstract: Software engineers get feedback from their development environment and automated test suites in real-time. They get feedback from QA engineers in a day or less. Errors can be fixed and verified in minutes. On the other hand, feedback from stakeholders outside of technology takes days and the “feedback frenzies” can drag on for weeks or even months. It is time for “the business” to dramatically reduce lead time and deliver value quicker without sacrificing quality. Fast feedback is the key to unlocking business agility.
Agile enables organizations to deliver value to customers faster. It took decades for software developers to reduce their delivery cycles from years to weeks or days. Fast feedback for testing and fixing was a significant driver of this acceleration. Companies should keep this lesson in mind as they bring Agile across the enterprise.
Today, feedback on creative designs, user experience, projects, programs, budgets, and contracts can take weeks, delaying the business outcomes. This workshop will provide methods, tips, and techniques to shorten those cycles to minutes. It starts by showing you how value stream mapping can highlight feedback loops which typically introduce significant delays. This helps to identify opportunities for dramatically faster feedback, allowing people outside of technology to complete stories and deliver value within a sprint. You will also hear how creative teams are learning from and adapting modern software techniques that build feedback into their processes in order to accelerate delivery from business teams.
Learning Outcomes: - The value of fast delivery
- Sources of delay, particularly outside of IT
- How to create a value stream map and use it to identify opportunities to reduce lead time
- How to calculate process efficiency
- How to identify high value and low value feedback
- How to use experiments to safely eliminate feedback frenzies