Agile by Design

Chapter 6Analytic Planning Hierarchies

Agile development leverages planning approaches at series of different levels. At the highest level sits business strategy definition and planning, a concept we briefly touched on in Chapter 3, Getting Your Analytic Project off the Ground and Chapter 4, Project Justification and Prioritization. However, it's important to recognize that these lower-level project-planning activities also fit into broader organizational strategies. Bringing these different planning hierarchies together is critical in setting organizational priorities, aligning resources, and agreeing on and evaluating results. No analytic project is an island—the analytic initiative aligns to strategic business objectives at the highest level, but also to other shorter-term goals. As you're planning your analytic release, outline the expected outputs from our projects and set release dates (see Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1 Analytic Planning Considerations

Analytic Project Example

As we think about release planning for our customer retention project, we have to anticipate the type of work that we will be performing. Again, we're not trying to be completely predictive or plan our project to death, but we do need to understand and define discrete deliverables. Coming out of the data spike, the team roughs out the work that will need to be accomplished so that it can be presented ...