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Information Technology Ecosystems
Published in James William Martin, Operational Excellence, 2021
Agile project management (APM) has gained widespread acceptance as an important set of tools and methods shown to be useful for managing software design projects. It is characterized by high quality work, adaptability to changing customer requirements and solutions, transparency of work, a high degree of customer collaboration, effective solutions delivered rapidly, and empowered teams. APM tools and methods have been adapted from analogous Lean tools and methods. Figure 8.5 shows basic elements of APM. These include gathering customer and stakeholder requirements and prioritizing them using a visual product backlog on a white board to promote collaboration. Visual displays of work tasks, activities, and milestones help manage and effectively communicate the project's status. The Agile team brainstorms user stories around features, functions, and requirements as well as the work tasks that need to be performed to complete user stories. User stories are in the form of “as a (role), I want to do (this task), so that (this result will occur).” As an example, a user story might be, “As a sales maker, I want to be able to update currency type so my expense report will be accurate for any country I visit.”
Agile Development for IoT Applications: Lessons Learned from a Case Study on Hydrants
Published in Rebecca Lee Hammons, Ronald J. Kovac, Fundamentals of Internet of Things for Non-Engineers, 2019
Timon Heinis, Johannes Heck, Filippo Fontana, Mirko Meboldt
User stories support the derivation of clear solution features from the high-level value propositions outlined. User stories describe the functionalities of a solution—the IoT application in this case—desired by a target user (Blomkvist 2005). As high-level requirements, user stories should be testable and independent from the technical implementation (Beck 2000). User stories follow a certain format: As a “someone,” I need “something” because of “some motivation.” The underlying motivation allows one to better estimate the value of a certain requirement. This is necessary for the subsequent prioritization of work increments. As IoT applications deliver semantic information, promising user stories demand “something” that users want to know.
Strategy Alignment
Published in James William Martin, Lean Six Sigma for the Office, 2021
The second APM attribute is the activity backlog. This is a mapping of the user stories that describe how features and functions will be used by the customer. These are further broken into discrete work tasks that in combination satisfy the user story. The advantage for using an activity backlog is that it is visual, and the work to be done is clearly seen. This visual view provides team members with the information needed to collaborate, schedule, and complete their work. Each sprint executes portions of the backlog work. The goal of sprints is frequent communication to prevent adding NVA features and functions to the design. The product owner prioritizes this backlog work and organizes it into sprints each day.
A Four-Pillared Holistic Model for Improving Performance in Engineering Virtual Project Teams
Published in Engineering Management Journal, 2020
Kickoff sessions are critical opportunities to engage with stakeholders, document success criteria, and set the tone for the VPT (Lumseyfai, Holzer, Blessner, & Olson, 2019). These sessions should occur in person to allow the VPT to associate faces with names, establish initial rapport, and build a sense of comradery (Bergiel et al., 2008). While VPTs can face challenges with documenting and understanding requirements (Casey, 2010), the use of user stories, found in the Agile development methodology, have shown to yield effective results in VPTs (Sutherland, Viktorov, Blount, & Puntikov, 2007). User stories are succinct descriptions of a feature or functionality request based on the perspective of particular users (Cohn, 2004; Sommerville, 2016). User stories provide enhanced, contextual layers of requirements, broken down into three components: “As a [particular user], I want to be able to [perform a particular function] in order to [achieve a particular outcome]” (Cohn, 2004). The documentation of success criteria is also important, given that successful completion of success criteria can yield favorable stakeholder satisfaction, in spite of results of traditional performance metrics (e.g., cost, schedule, and performance) (Hughes, Tippett, & Thomas, 2004).
Lessons from a Marine Spatial Planning data management process for Ireland
Published in International Journal of Digital Earth, 2021
Sarah Flynn, Will Meaney, Adam M. Leadbetter, Jeffrey P. Fisher, Caitriona Nic Aonghusa
Before defining a process for Marine Spatial Planning data, key users of the system and data sources managed by the system were defined. A user story is an informal, natural language description of one or more features of a specific system. User stories are written from the perspective of an end user or user of a system. User stories created for the MSP process described by this paper were written using the format