Managing Project Risk and Incremental Design Innovation Rebecca Wirfs-Brock ©2011 Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Innovation introduction of new things or methods exposure to the chance of injury or loss Risk

Types of Risks Schedule & budget Operational – 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

A Project Landing Zone A range of measurable attributes that must be achieved to declare project or product success 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 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?

Hypothetical Landing Zone for a Smart Phone Attribute Minimum acceptable TargetOutstanding Battery life - standby300 hours320 hours420 hours Battery life - in use270 minutes300 minutes380 minutes Footprint2.5 x 4.8 x x 4.6 x x 4.5 x.37 Screen size600 x x 640 Digital camera resolution 8 MP 9 MP Weight5 oz4.8 oz4 oz

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 AttributeMinimumTargetOutstanding Data Quality: Accuracy (percent in error) for critical attributes <2.5%1.5%0.5% Performance: xxx transactions per hour 60,00075,000100,000 Usability:Learning time xxx management system tasks by a new quality analyst <16 hrs8 hrs4 hrs

Use to identify and manage: Landing Zone Uses Identify and manage Potential risks Innovations required Skills to be acquired … Photo by e.r.w.i.n. Used with attribution

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

XP Design Spike “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

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

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

20 -Rebecca