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Tag: Project Management

Top 10 Business Trends to Watch for in 2022

Written by Andrea Brockmeier on . Posted in Articles.

By Andrea Brockmeier, Jason Cassidy, Susan Heidorn, Jose Marcial Portilla, and Mike Stuedemann

While 2021 has been better in many ways than 2020, it doesn’t feel much more predictable. Yet, at Educate 360 we have identified some the biggest trends we are seeing and expect organizations to continue experiencing in Project Management, Business Analysis, Agile, Data Science, and Leadership in the year ahead.

Overall, the theme of working remotely comes through loud and clear and we expect it to impact almost every area that we covered.

Here are our Top 10 trends to watch for in 2022. We’d love to hear your thoughts about our observations and prognostications.

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Project Management

Project Managers as Project Leaders

The recognition that project managers are both leaders and managers is not new, but the need for the leadership aspect of the role has intensified in the last couple of years and will continue to do so in 2022. In fact, we are hearing more organizations using the title project leader as opposed to project manager.

To be sure, the technical aspects of the job such as scheduling, budgeting, and tracking haven’t been eliminated, but the need for skills like influencing, facilitating, communicating and other “soft” skills associated with the PM as leader has become paramount. Project managers as leaders are going to continue to be challenged in 2022 with distributed teams and all the distractions of ever-changing global and work environments. Leading the team and engaging stakeholders to sustain buy-in is going to continue to be job one for effective PMs in 2022.

More Organizations Using Project Management Tools

In 2022, expect to see a continued increase in the use of project management tools beyond the standard Microsoft Office suite. We used to see only the occasional client using a PM application of any kind and it was almost always Microsoft Project. Whether because people are working remotely, tools have become more cost effective, or tools have become more accessible and easier to use, we see more organizations using PM-specific tools and we’re seeing a wider variety of tools, as well.

At first this may seem contradictory to the previous trend of project leadership getting emphasized over project management; tools are not generally used for the leadership aspects of the PM role. Perhaps these trends are mutually reinforcing in that tools like Asana, Wrike, Easy Project, Smartsheet and others help with project management which allows the PM to tend to the demands of project leadership. Whatever the reason, we look ahead to 2022 as a robust year for PM tool implementation.

Business Analysis

Strong Facilitation and Communication Skills for Remote Business Analysts

We have all have heard about the Great Resignation – employees leaving their jobs in record numbers in search of better pay and career opportunities, a healthier work-life balance, a less toxic working environment, and desire to continue to work remotely. As a result, many companies are reducing their carbon footprint as well as costs, so they either have smaller offices, holding a space for meetings or providing “hoteling” spaces when employees need or want to go into the office to work. Organizations are also realizing that they can hire talent around the globe.

So, what does this mean for business analysts? It means we must get better at communicating and facilitating in a virtual environment. We must learn how to build trust when we can’t directly “see” stakeholders daily. We must be able to facilitate virtually to ensure we elicit inclusive requirements and not just those from a few vocal stakeholders. We need to learn to creatively collaborate with our team members, colleagues, and key stakeholders to ensure we have their buy-in.

BAs need to think about communicating and facilitating with more intention. This calls for mindful facilitation as opposed to simply the ability to use Microsoft Teams, Slack, or other communication platforms. We are already starting to see – and we continue to see in 2022 – more BAs focus on learning how to create safe, trust-laden, and collaborative environments within which stakeholders readily share information in a world that has been changed forever.

Digital Transformation Strategy Supported by Business Analysis

Digital transformation has been a trend for some years, and it is still going full steam ahead. Yet, most of these efforts fail. There are many reasons cited for this failure; among the most common include:

  • NOT understanding the business problem, but instead just throwing solutions or technology at the wall to see what sticks.
  • NOT determining success criteria so organizations have no way of knowing if the initiative has been successful because there was not a shared understanding of what success looked like.
  • NOT realizing that digital transformation introduces cultural changes in the organization (which is also one of the reasons many organizations had difficulty adopting agile).

Because of these failures, organizations moving toward digital transformation will rely more on business analysis capabilities to effectively address root causes of the problems above. BAs will be used on digital transformation initiatives to ensure the business problem or opportunity has been fully analyzed and understood, to verify that the organization is ready to adopt the new culture, and to identify overall success measures as well as identifying smaller, incremental success measures that can be measured throughout the project.

These efforts will also require a business analyst’s in-depth knowledge of agile business analysis approaches, tools, and techniques that will be critical as organizations strive to become more agile in their ability to respond to customers and competitors. Look for lots of opportunities in 2022 for BAs to plug in as key strategic resources on digital transformations.

Agile

Teams Continue to be Distributed – By Choice, Not Necessity

It can be argued that the COVID 19 pandemic did more to transform the world of work than any document, framework, certification approach or technology. One of the lasting impacts of the pandemic is that distributed teams are here to stay. Product development team members and their leaders will need to permanently adjust to working in a distributed fashion.

While many still share the perception that all Agile frameworks require co-located teams (see principle 6 associated with the Agile Manifesto), technology has advanced to the point where a team adopting a framework doesn’t need to all be in the same location. Continued discipline, particularly in the area of communication and team working together agreements, will be required as teams shift from distributed work by necessity to distributed work by choice.

Scaling – Addition by Addition or Addition by Subtraction?

The marketplace continues to see the emergence and growth of a number of Agile scaling frameworks. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Scrum at Scale (S@S) and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) are just a few of the prominent entries in this space. Next year will see organizations continue to adopt these frameworks as they seek to realize the benefits of being more responsive to change at a global level.

Current thoughts are mixed regarding how to achieve this goal. While many of the current frameworks (e.g., SAFe) advocate adding structure and layers, some like LeSS believe that true organizational agility can only be achieved by removing items from the organization that don’t directly contribute to the delivery of customer value. This debate is even more nuanced when the idea that some additional structure might be necessary on a temporary basis while the organization is being transformed. In 2022, we expect to see continued debate as to what steps are actually necessary to achieve agility on a global scale.

Agile Outside of Software

The Agile movement was born in the software development space. After all, it is called the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”. In recent years, other domains have adopted a number of the values and principles that define the Agile movement in attempt to accrue its benefits. For example, there is currently an Agile Marketing Manifesto as well as efforts to bring an Agile mindset and some of its practices into education.

This trend will accelerate in 2022 as events such as the pandemic, natural disaster, and political and economic shifts remind organizations that the only constant is change.

Data Science

Increasing Application of Artificial Intelligence and Reinforcement Learning

We often hear that Artificial Intelligence is one of the trends that will change the world. This past year certainly validates that sentiment, and 2022 will continue to see evidence of this powerful trend.

But what is actually meant by the term “Artificial Intelligence”? Technically speaking, AI systems typically incorporate a special type of machine learning known as “Reinforcement Learning.” These specialized programs allow a computer to learn the same way a human does, through experience with trial and error.

In 2016, DeepMind (an Alphabet company) made headlines when its computer program AlphaGo beat the world’s best Go player, a feat many previously thought was impossible. The AlphaGo program worked through Reinforcement Learning methods, where the computer played thousands of games against itself, learning the best tactics to win the game of Go.

Fortunately, Reinforcement Learning has applications beyond just board games. In 2021, DeepMind released AlphaFold 2, a computer AI program that can accurately predict protein folding structures, opening up new possibilities in drug discovery and medicine.

The application of AI and reinforcement learning will definitely be a trend to keep an eye on, as the progress has increased exponentially.

Huge Strides to Continue with Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the use of machine learning models to interpret raw text data, such as Wikipedia articles or even code written by humans. Traditionally, NLP technology has been used for classifying text articles into categories or sentiment analysis of reviews. By simply training NLP models on existing text data sets, the models can learn the topic of a new article, or whether a movie review is positive or negative.

Huge strides have recently been made in the capabilities of upcoming NLP technology. In 2020, OpenAI released “Generative Pre-trained Transformed 3,” commonly known as GPT-3, which has the ability to generate text that is nearly indistinguishable from that written by a human. GPT-3 was trained on hundreds of billions of words that were scraped from the internet and is even capable of coding in CSS, JSX, Python, among others.

In 2021, OpenAI further expanded on the idea of an NLP model that can code, by releasing Codex and Github Copilot. These futuristic state-of-the-art models can not only automatically complete large portions of code, but they can also accept a description of what the code should do and produce the corresponding code. Check out this Codex demo launch video.

The future is already here! We are definitely looking for exciting new applications of NLP continue to make headlines in 2022.

Leadership

Attracting & Retaining Talent – But Different Than Before

Attracting and retaining talent is the most prominent topic of conversation we’ve observed in media related to leadership, specifically attracting and retaining talent in a COVID-changed environment. It’s not clear anyone has permanently figured out the solution as the situation is still in flux, so we have listed key points that we hear leaders weighing in with in their decisions related to remote work and its implications for finding quality team members.

Let’s start by making a broad assumption (that certainly can still be refuted) that some jobs cannot be done remotely (e.g., printing and shipping) and some jobs potentially can be done remotely. Below are the key topics of debate that will continue to shape this discussion in 2022:

  • Job Equity: Is it fair to the people whose roles cannot be done remotely and who have to come into the workplace that others can work at home? As this question is discussed topics related to safety, expenses, commute time, flexibility, teamwork, fairness all come into play.
  • Productivity: Even if jobs can be done remotely, what is the level of productivity of remote work versus work in the office? As this question is discussed one hears that people work longer hours at home because they are not commuting, that people are more productive at home because they can focus and not be disturbed. On the other hand, you hear others say that people are less productive at home because they are distracted by non-work items and that people are less productive at home because they are not being watched. You also hear discussion of managers’ ability to manage in-person versus remote team members.
  • Cultural Impact: Even if a job can be done at home, is it better for the organizational culture? As this question is discussed topics related to collaboration, mentoring, camaraderie, organic problem solving and innovation, and work-life balance come into play.

These debates and questions will dominate leadership conversations in the coming year as leaders continue the challenge of finding and hanging on to top talent.

Jason Cassidy, PMP, is CEO of Educate 360, the parent company of Project Management Academy, Watermark Learning, and Pierian Data. – training partners of choice helping organizations improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness, increase cross-functional alignment, and drive results to help meet and exceed business performance goals.

Andrea Brockmeier, PMP, is Director of Project Management at Watermark Learning, an Educate 360 partner company. Dr. Susan Heidorn, PMP, CBAP, BRMP is Director of Business Solutions at Watermark Learning. Jose Marcel Portilla is Head of Data Science at Pierian Data Inc., an Educate 360 partner. Mike Stuedemann, PMP, CST, is a Scrum-Focused, Agile Agnostic Coach and Trainer at AgilityIRL and partners with Watermark Learning for Scrum courses.

Join our webinar on December 10 to hear our contributors talk about these trends and answer questions.

Meeting Expectations When It Comes to Meetings

Written by Jake Thompson on . Posted in Articles.

Meetings. The conglomerated work effort to bring about the grouping of individuals to converse and discuss topics of relatable interest at a given point of time. In mere words, meetings are one of the several crutches of work in business analysis that endeavors to accomplishing our goals. Whether you relish them or dread them, meetings are compulsory. Open your calendars and assuredly you will see on a daily or weekly basis that you have a concentrated number of meetings spanning numerous projects. Or, if you are one of the lucky ones, your meetings can be far and few in between. My personal record in the marathon of meetings has been eight meetings in a workday, all different, varying projects and spanning four hours of the day. When I converse with people outside of work and inform them of my longwinded hours of speaking or listening in on meetings, they give me an incredulous look and with care: “How do you get any work done?”

Some of us may admit that we have faced this question and own to some self-truth: we may not be wholly paying attention to the meeting. Answering emails, preparing for the next meeting; perhaps, you stepped out for a quick cup of coffee, with the camera off as a preventive measure. In the virtual world that we found ourselves transitioned to by the public health pandemic that is COVID-19, it has allowed ourselves to grant meeting liberties we would not possess if we were meeting in the office. However, authentically, we should be setting our expectations and meeting them when it comes to these meetings to effectively achieve our objectives. So, when I was posed with this question, I took some time to reflect, and born was this article. How do we meet our expectations when it comes to meetings to make them effective and to get “work done”? For myself, it has become a set of principles to follow as a guideline when it comes to these sessions. These fall into timing, focusing, documenting, and communicating.

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There are only so many hours in the working week that we can accomplish what we want to, and it never feels like there is enough time. Meetings can be an impairment to our limited time in the week, miring our stacked to-do list. However, it does not always have to be this way! The first tenet to the meetings is to appropriately time them. Timing with effectiveness is everything when it comes to the foundation of a meeting. Consider, when scheduling one, an honest effort of how much time the meeting should take. If you know it will take an hour, schedule an hour, persist to keeping to an hour, and be pleasantly surprised if your meeting is shorter than anticipated! Timing effectively is not a skill learned overnight; nevertheless, it is one that can be continually improved upon through best practice.

Additionally, focus on meetings comes in two forms: preparation and execution. I have found that being prepared for meetings can strike chords in the efforts of delivering an effective meeting. Rudimentary in nature, necessary by necessity. Know your subject, what your objective is and how you are going to achieve said objective. Execution will then follow shortly thereafter; and keeping your meeting attendees focused is baked into this. Too often, “meeting creep” can set in and suddenly your hand is forced to reschedule or schedule more meetings to impair your effective timing. Avoid the divergence by preparation and keeping on track, for both yourself and attendees.

When it comes to documenting, a wise person in the IT realm when I had been in my secondary education, once told me to “document everything.” At the time, it made no sense. Now, it means truly that: responsibly document everything when it comes to meetings. Whether it be sharing your screen with a running document or the old-fashioned pen and paper, meeting minutes and notes are the core aspect to documenting the action items and deliverables in projects. It serves it’s purpose to be able to say who, when, where, what, why and how someone was able to do something in a project when it was documented during a meeting of said project. One does not, nor must not, transcribe every word; yet glean a holistic enough perspective to highlight the key points with enough information for reference.

The tried-and-true adage that “communication is key,” is not just for relationships in our personal and professional lives. It is true for meetings. The ability to communicate with transparency and effectually is the last rounded effort of the lexicon that promotes a synergized meeting. Go back to your preparation and execution from the “focus” principle and translate that into the communication you are delivering. Instead of meager words forming together sentences that might satisfactorily achieve the objective, aim for the exceeding and deliver on what your best work is each time, and your meetings will thank you.

Meetings. The word may forever be ingrained into our brains as a hallowed term in the business analysis field or ring us full of trepidation. Yet, if we remind ourselves of the tenets homed in on this article, we may find that meetings are not as tripe and dismaying as they are. They are a major source of our work and should be treated no differently than any of our other aspects of efforts. We hold ourselves accountable for the work we deliver as business analysts and the work outputs of meetings are equivalent. Spend the little amount of time it takes to accomplish these items, in no order, and experiment with how much more you can further your meetings. You may find that your work is completed in a timely, or even early, fashion.

How Business Analysts Boost Productivity Within Operations Teams

Written by Jimmy Rodela on . Posted in Articles.

Here’s an undeniable truth: Highly productive companies generate more revenue.

However, establishing optimum productivity isn’t always as easy to pull off.

This is where Business Analysts (BAs) come in handy.

Business analysts can increase your operations team’s productivity by helping them meet the set goals, boost their performance, and drill down on key areas for improvement.

BAs can even provide business analysis as a service to help Chief Information Officers (CIOs) deliver successful strategies by leveraging the right technology.

If you’re not convinced yet, read on to learn more about how business analysts can boost your operations teams’ productivity.

1. Determine operational needs

Business analysts offer the skills and expertise to help your company and teams identify operational needs through in-depth analyses of your targets and requirements.

For instance, a critical yet easily overlooked aspect that can impact your operations team’s performance is inefficient employee scheduling.

Managers could spend productive hours manually scheduling employee shifts, recording attendance, and processing payroll.

These paper-based methods eat up a lot of time and effort and can be open to errors that seriously impact your employees’ productivity and even cost you money.

Business analysts can help your operations teams address this by drilling down on your specific operational needs and help you find the right approach and implement the appropriate tools.

For example, BAs could help you look for, adopt, and implement the best-fitting online employee scheduling software to automate your scheduling process and solve productivity gaps while saving tons of time and energy.

That said, business analysts can help shape your operations team’s decision-making process by understanding the operational needs and the best strategies (and tools) to improve productivity and achieve success.

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2. Identify gaps and provide effective solutions

Business analysts have the training to “jump into” your existing processes and workflows quickly and work with your team members to pinpoint problems and work together to solve them efficiently.

They have the focus, time, and expertise to dig deep into your existing operational methods, strategies, workflows, and tools to see bottlenecks and gaps and steer your team members toward the right solutions.

For instance, business analysts can help you identify and analyze aspects in your customer service processes that eat up too much time and resources, affect their performance, and keep them from achieving optimum productivity.

BAs can then use the data and results to help you choose and deploy the right solutions. This can include streamlining critical parts of your client support workflows through robust customer service automation software.

With the help of business analysts, you can seamlessly optimize your operations team’s workflows, ensure they meet targets, and improve performance.

3. Streamline workflows to reduce operational costs and risks

While you can’t eliminate all the risks that usually come with operations, business analysts can help you reduce them, including lowering your operational costs.

Hiring qualified BAs allows you to tap into professional strategies and skills to manage your operational risks while reducing expenses.

For instance, a business analyst could assess your existing business processes and recommend investing in asset maintenance tools to improve productivity and lower operational costs.

If you run an equipment rental company, one of your business analysts’ strategic recommendations can be using digital equipment inspection forms to streamline and automate your workflows.

Doing so speeds up performing your equipment inspections and increases the accuracy of your results. This helps you manage your assets efficiently while ensuring you keep all your equipment in optimum condition.

You can reduce repair costs, keep operations running smoothly, and, in turn, save time, labor, and money while increasing your operations teams’ and company’s overall productivity.

Also, since online all your equipment inspection and associated data get stored on the cloud, everyone with the right credentials can easily access them. This can streamline your workflows and reduce manual, paper-based processes that can eat up a chunk of your resources.

4. Implement data driven strategies

Business analysts offer valuable expertise by helping your operations team leverage data to supercharge your processes and boost productivity.

BAs can help your operations team analyze and extract actionable insights from your data to achieve a seamless operational process.

Instead of bungling through the sometimes deep learning curve of advanced data analytics tools, you can work with a business analyst to walk your team through the process.

This allows your team to gain and leverage data insights quickly, helping your business get results faster.

For instance, BAs can help you analyze your customer experience data and determine the appropriate strategies and adjustments to improve client experiences with your brand. This can include adopting computerized cash registers into your systems.

Business analysts can help translate your raw data into useful information and turn them into easy-to-digest ideas, proposals, and even projects to make your operations more efficient.

5. Play various roles across your company

Most operational processes cut across multiple areas within a company. This makes business analysts valuable since they can often apply their expertise in many departments, such as sales, marketing, customer service, Information Technology, etc.

BAs can wear many hats and are not limited to just one area or department within your business. This allows them to help improve various processes and boost your company’s overall efficiency and productivity.

A dependable business analyst’s diverse skill set lets them start with one department and move through other parts of your entire operational process.

This allows business analysts to extend their services to other critical areas or all levels within your company that require business analysis support.

Working with a business analyst allows your operations team and other departments to work more efficiently and productively while ensuring your operations align with your organizational goals.

Also, business analysts help with your internal and external-facing processes while helping your teams keep up with industry trends, so your company maintains a competitive edge.

Wrapping up the role of business analysts in productive operations teams

A dependable business analyst can help ensure your business operations are highly functional, efficient, and geared towards optimum productivity.

BAs provide the necessary expertise, skillset, and experience and help your team find and deploy the right strategies and tools to help your operations team achieve optimum productivity.

The more productive your business operations are the higher your company’s profitability.

While working with business analysts can require a bit of an investment, the benefits of hiring one can far outweigh the costs and help your company sustain long-term growth and success.

Agile Vs Waterfall in Healthcare

Written by Jimmy Rodela on . Posted in Articles.

The healthcare sector is one of the biggest and fastest-growing industries today. It includes companies that manufacture medical equipment, drugs, provide medical services, and facilitate the provision of healthcare products (among other things).

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare occupations are expected to grow by 15 percent from 2019 to 2029. The number of nurse practitioners alone is expected to increase by a whopping 52 percent within this time frame. This growth rate is much faster than the average for all non-healthcare occupations.

The rapid growth of the healthcare industry, which is worth a staggering $4 trillion based on the data from the 2020 Forbes Healthcare Virtual Summit, brings with it the need for more efficient patient care, a reduction in costs, and a better overall experience for patients. This is known as the Triple Aim.

This is where tools for project management and extensive knowledge of project management methodologies, namely agile and waterfall, will come into play.

After reading this article, you should have a deeper understanding of the agile and waterfall methodologies as well as their pros and cons. You should also be able to determine for yourself whether adopting waterfall or agile practices is best for any given scenario.

The waterfall development methodology

This flowchart shows the step-by-step process that is used in the waterfall development methodology. Image source: (https://www.macadamian.com/learn/when-to-use-waterfall-vs-agile/) Alt-text: Flowchart depicting steps used in waterfall development methodology: Gather & Document Requirements, Design, Development, Testing, Development/Delivery, and Final Outcome.

The waterfall development methodology is an approach to creating a product or service that entails the breaking down of project functions into distinct stages. Each succeeding stage is dependent on the outcome of the previous one, and completing them sequentially, within a strict budget and timeline, is necessary.

Within the healthcare sector, most people are more familiar with the waterfall development method and are comfortable with using it in their daily activities.

Using the waterfall method allows project managers to have a clear overview of the project. It also gives them an idea of the timeline for each stage of that project.

However, one downside to using the waterfall method is that it is inflexible by nature. This means that difficulties will often be encountered if there is even a slight deviation to the project plan.

 

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Waterfall development methodology pros

Below are several good points about the waterfall development methodology.

1. Extensive documentation

You won’t be able to backtrack to a previous stage of a project while using the waterfall method without wasting valuable time and resources. This forces you to create thorough documentation from the very beginning.

2. Knowledge stays in the organization

Thanks to extensive documentation, you won’t need to worry about lost knowledge in case someone from the team decides to leave the project. Also, you won’t need to spend time training new team members since they will easily be able to become familiar with the project by viewing the documentation themselves.

3. Team members can plan their time more efficiently

Team members will know in advance what they’ll be working on. This allows them to plan out their tasks more efficiently.

4. Easily understandable

Because the waterfall method lays out the project in a way that is easily understandable, project management is usually straightforward.

5. Client input isn’t required

Client input is kept to a minimum except for occasional reviews, status meetings, and necessary approvals.

 

Waterfall development methodology cons

Below are negative points worth looking out for when using the waterfall development methodology.

1. No backtracking

Going back and making changes to a stage in the project that has already been completed can be costly and time-consuming. This puts a lot of pressure on team members during the planning phase.

2. No room for mistakes during the requirements phase

All the other stages of the project rely heavily on the requirements phase. Making errors here can doom the project even before it makes any significant headway.

3. Deadline creep

The domino effect is common in the waterfall method. This means that once a deadline is missed in just one stage of the project, the succeeding stages will most likely be affected as well.

4. End result may not be what the client actually needs

Because client involvement is kept to a minimum, the end product may end up not being what the client actually needs. This can lead to a major overhaul in the project plan which can eat into the project’s budget.

5. Unforeseen problems

Because the waterfall method is inflexible, it can be difficult to deal with unforeseen problems when they arise.

 

The agile development methodology

As you can see from this flowchart, the agile method and the waterfall method are quite similar. The key difference between the two is the agile method’s added feedback loop. (Image source: https://www.macadamian.com/learn/when-to-use-waterfall-vs-agile/). Alt-text: Flowchart depicting steps used in agile development methodology: Establish Requirements, Design, Develop, Test, Deploy, Micro Outcome, Feedback and Final Outcome.

Most modern healthcare organizations prefer to use agile planning over waterfall planning. This is largely due to the healthcare sector’s growing demand for newer project management tools and methodologies that adapt to constantly changing needs while allowing team members to be both disciplined and accountable.

In a nutshell, the agile development method encourages collaboration and frequent adaptation. This is in stark contrast to the inflexible nature of the waterfall method which favors careful planning.

Additionally, because the customers themselves are much more involved in the agile process, there is a much higher probability of customer satisfaction which can be attributed to agile in customer success.

While the stages of both the waterfall and the agile method are quite similar, the practices and values couldn’t be more different. (Image source: https://activecollab.com/blog/project-management/agile-project-management). Alt-text: Image depicting numerous agile practices and values

Here are three agile practices that you can start using right now:

1. The daily standup

This is a short daily meeting which usually lasts no more than 15 minutes. It allows the team to touch base and share important information.

2. The retrospective

At various stages during the project’s development, the team makes an assessment of their performance.

The three key questions teams ask themselves are:

  1. What worked well for us?
  2. What didn’t work well?
  3. What can be done differently to improve results?

3. Customer demos

This is done by presenting working versions of products or services to the customer at certain points throughout the development stages.

Agile development methodology pros

Below are positive points about the agile development methodology.

1. Agile is flexible

Because agile promotes a flexible approach to project management, priorities and requirements can easily be adjusted on the fly without any real consequences

2. Agile empowers the team

A team that uses the agile development method is NOT directed by a manager. It is expected to be self-organized, allowing members to set their own working standards and timelines.

3. Agile speeds up the production process

Because less time is spent on planning and documentation, the team is able to focus more on what needs to be done in order to be able to deliver a working iteration of the product or service.

A study was even done on applying agile practices to rare disease drug development to encourage evolutionary development, adaptive planning, rapid and flexible response to change, and continuous improvement.

4. Learning is encouraged and embraced

Learning is an integral part of the production process when it comes to the agile development method. With every iteration, the team learns how to improve upon the product or service that they are currently developing.

5. More opportunity for creativity

agile works better when the product’s design and vision isn’t too well defined. This allows the team to develop the product or service in conjunction with the customer’s input.

Agile development methodology cons

Below are some of the negative points when using agile development.

1. Outcome and timeline aren’t as predictable

Though agile’s iterative approach to developing a product or service allows the team to be flexible with their scope and timeline, the drawback is that timelines are often less predictable and aren’t set in stone.

2. The customer needs to invest time in the product

In agile development, the input of the customer is vital to the production process. This means that unwanted setbacks can occur if the client is frequently unavailable.

3. Documentation isn’t available

As previously mentioned, documentation isn’t one of the priorities of the agile development method. With no documentation, lost knowledge can quickly become a major issue should any team members decide to quit.

The lack of documentation can make knowledge transfer, training, and agile implementation challenging.

Based on survey data, 23% of respondents say insufficient training, education, and best practices for implementing agile hinders the proper adoption of agile practices within the organization.

4. A lack of trust within the team can be catastrophic

Trust is crucial in the agile development method since all the team members should be working closely to produce the best results. A lack of trust within the team can cause big problems down the line.

5. Re-work is unavoidable

Because the agile method values collaboration and frequent adaptation, a lot of time is inevitably spent working, and re-working, the product or service. This usually goes on until both the development team and the client are satisfied with the end product.

 

Which development method should you use?

There are a number of factors that you should consider before deciding on the best methodology to use for your healthcare organization.

For instance, if your project, such as adopting new software to improve your organization’s healthcare system, has strict regulatory requirements and there is little to no room to make changes, you may want to opt for the waterfall development method.

On the other hand, if your organization doesn’t have a strict process to follow and you have the luxury of being able to work flexibly, then going with the agile method may be a better choice.

At the end of the day, knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your team, as well as having an extensive understanding of the pros and cons of both the waterfall and the agile development methods for your healthcare facility and operations, will help you make a smarter, more educated decision as to which development methodology should work best for you.