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Agile Project Management & Product Strategy - A Case Study - The New Product Development Plan

October 20, 2008 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Agile Project Management

Agile Project Management & Product Strategy - A Case Study - The New Product Development Plan (#3 in the series Agile Project Management and Product Strategy - A Case Study)
By Eric D. Brown

To create the new development plan, I visited a few key clients to gather requirements for features that they felt must be in the software in order for it to be valuable to them. After these visits, I sat down with the development team and created a “Top Feature List” to help us focus the development efforts on only those features that were the most valuable to our clients.

Interestingly enough, the items that ended up being the most important items for the clients were the last things to be implemented in the original development plan. It’s amazing what a little bit of client communication will do!

Using agile software development methods, common sense and the “Top Feature List” gathered from my discussions with clients, the team and I created a development plan. The new plan would allow for the most important (i.e., valuable) features that our key clients were looking for to be ready for release as a Beta release within 3 months.

Due to the small team size and the inability to bring in additional developers, some of the tasks still needed to be performed in parallel but most of the tasks were performed in parallel with each other. Table 2 shows the new product development plan.

Start Iteration 1
Task Timeline
Database Design - DBA Resource 30 days
Network Architecture - Network Resource 45 days
User Interface - GUI Resource 45 days
CMS Integration - DBA Resource 15 days
Total Time 45 days
Demo to Clients 1.5 months from start of project
Start Iteration 2
Task Timeline
User Interface - GUI Resource 45 days
Documentation - Document Resource 15 days
CMS Integration - DBA Resource 45 days
System Testing- QA Resource 30 days
Total Time 45 days
Beta Released to clients 3 months from start of project
Start Iteration 3
Task Timeline
Network Architecture - Network Resource 45 days
User Interface - GUI Resource 30 days
CMS Integration - DBA Resource 15 days
System Testing - QA Resource 15 days
Total Time 45 days
Beta2 Released to clients 4.5 months from start of project
Start Iteration 4
Task Timeline
Network Architecture - Network Resource 30 days
User Interface - GUI Resource 15 days
CMS Integration - DBA Resource 30 days
Documentation - Document Resource 15 days
System Testing - QA Resource 45 days
Total Time 45 days
Final Release to clients 6 months from start of project

Table 2: New Development Plan

The budget for the new plan turned out to be less than half of the original budget, although we weren’t trying to dramatically cut costs, the shortening of the development cycle by half brought us considerable cost savings.

The outcome of the plan thrilled senior executives, investors and clients. Based on the first Beta release, we were able to book about $1.5 million in revenue that may never have been booked if we had used the original plan. The initial Beta release was nothing like the final release from the original plan, but it did provide the key features that the client(s) wanted to see.

The release after the final iteration contained about 85% of the features from the original plan. Think about that…85% of the product features in half the time at less than half the cost! That’s the power of agile thinking!

After the final iteration, the product was released to quite a bit of fanfare. In addition to the revenue we had already gained with the Beta release, we were able capture another $2 million in revenue from new clients and create a great footing for the company in the marketplace. At the time that version 1.0 was released, the competition was still mired in product planning and development and their release dates seemed to be at least another 12 months out.

About Eric D. Brown:

Eric is a consultant specializing in IT Strategy, Selection and Implementation with over 14 years of experience in project leadership roles. Eric’s blog, found at http://ericbrown.com, provides an insight into the struggle of trying to align technology, strategy, people and projects.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 and is filed under Agile Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1 person has left a comment

Great Article, however I have a quick question as I’m just learning the ropes of Agile in real world scenarios.

With regards to your development plan, was it completed in its entirity only after the last iteration (ie each iteration was planned JIT), or did you feel senior managers needed each iteration mapped out for budgeting purposes?

Wilf wrote on December 17, 2008 - 9:43 am | Visit Link

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