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

2. 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

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

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

5. 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.

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

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

13. 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

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

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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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