Managing Project Risk and Incremental Design Innovation Rebecca Wirfs-Brock rebecca@wirfs-brock.com ©2011 Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

exposure to the chance of injury or loss Innovation canrenew or improve something that exists and not only, as is commonly assumed, the introduction of something new or better. Innovation Risk exposure to the chance of injury or loss  introduction of new things or methods

Types of Risks Schedule & budget Operational Technical execution resources communications Technical too complex poorly defined misunderstood

Risk Management Strategies Avoid Share: Insure or transfer Retain: Accept and budget for Reduce: optimize or mitigate Incremental development Outsourcing Design Innovation

Landing Zone A small section of a deck that a pilot must touch down in to land the plane safely In disk storage technology : A non-data space on a computer's hard disk where the read/write heads rest, or park, when the computer's power is turned off. From Urban dictionary.com Since Vietnam, the term has come to mean any bad, rough, or uncomfortable situation.

A Project Landing Zone Each requirement in the landing zone has a range of acceptable values: Minimum, Target, and Outstanding Multi-dimensional success criteria Minimum can seem unacceptable in isolation; but not when you consider everything Landing zones are useful for products, projects, and programs. First conceived of by Erik Simmons of Intel (a friend who has had a big impact on Product Quality and Req’ts Eng. at Intel). Erik shared with me this technique and I have used it with clients who face tough decisions and needed to set parameters for a large program and achieve them through various forms of innovation.. A range of measurable attributes that must be achieved to declare project or product success

Landing Zones Help You Focus Rolls up success to several key indicators Easier to make sense of the bigger project picture: What happens when one attribute edges below minimum? How do others trend? When will targets be achieved? Drives ongoing tradeoffs, decisions, and risk mitigation investments

Hypothetical Landing Zone for a Smart Phone Attribute Minimum acceptable Target Outstanding Battery life - standby 300 hours 320 hours 420 hours Battery life - in use 270 minutes 300 minutes 380 minutes Footprint 2.5 x 4.8 x .57 2.4 x 4.6 x .4 2.31 x 4.5 x .37 Screen size 600 x 400 960 x 640 Digital camera resolution 8 MP 9 MP Weight 5 oz 4.8 oz 4 oz Each row in the landing zone represents a measurable requirement. Each requirement has a range of acceptable values labeled Minimum, Target, and Outstanding. The goal is to have each requirement within this range at the end of development. Inside the range is the desired value, labeled Target. Minimum, Target, and Outstanding are relative to the budget and timeframe you have.

Agreeing on Landing Zone Targets Someone makes a first “rough cut” Base targets on history & evidence Discuss and fine-tune as a group product manager, architects, QA lead Informed consensus-building

Landing Zone Precision & Granularity Attribute Minimum Target Outstanding Data Quality: Accuracy (percent in error) for critical attributes <2.5% 1.5% 0.5% Performance: xxx transactions per hour 60,000 75,000 100,000 Usability:Learning time xxx management system tasks by a new quality analyst <16 hrs 8 hrs 4 hrs

Landing Zone Uses Use to identify and manage: Identify and manage Defines project scope and ambitions. Identify and manage Potential risks Innovations required Skills to be acquired … Photo by e.r.w.i.n. Used with attribution http://www.flickr.com/photos/eherrera/5104896694/

Software Architecture Wayfinding Scouting—looking enough ahead Active, integrative Seeing what the options are Exploring, explaining, and then selling them

XP Design Spike —Don Wells “A spike solution is a very simple program to explore potential solutions. Build the spike to only addresses the problem under examination and ignore all other concerns. Most spikes are not good enough to keep, so expect to throw it away. The goal is reducing the risk of a technical problem or increase the reliability of a user story’s estimate.” —Don Wells http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/spike.html

Design Innovation Spike Answers deep questions about potential solutions for achieving landing zone targets Not as tactical or incidental as an XP Design Spike

Criteria For an Innovation Spike: Answer Bounded Questions Feasibility Reasonable design approach Alternatives Recommended process changes Better cost estimates …

Example Innovation Spikes Business transaction redesign Document parsing Fact representation & rule simplification Automated location of external resources … Scale up, scale out, re-distribute, re-think… Try out radical changes in how things are done

What You Do In an Innovation Spike prototyping design noodling looking outside experimenting modeling vet ideas Explore potential paths Talk to others Short experiments Extrapolate Conclude based on experience, intelligence gathered & intuition

Criteria For an Innovation Spike: Actionable Results Buy information that Feeds into future release planning Adjusts the release roadmap Recalibrates your landing zone Drives new development and design

Design Innovation Spike Best Practices Small, smart, goal-oriented teams avoid us vs. them mentality Evidence-based answers working prototypes existing similar things Failure is an option permit answers that will shift your goals

-Rebecca rebecca@wirfs-brock.com www.wirfs-brock.com