DCBADD2015 public sector agile

Public Sector Agile,

BI and the BA (You)

October 2nd, 2015

Roland Cuellar

Clayton Dean

Bios

Roland Cuellar (‘kway-are’)

• Business Process and Strategy

Consultant, NTT

• Agile consulting for about 10 years

• CSM, CSPO, CSP, LSS Green Belt

• Computer Science and MBA

• Cycling, car racing, and generally

“going fast”

• Roland.Cuellar@nttData.com

Clayton Dean• Managing Direct, Piper Consulting

Group

• Practicing Agile-ist/XP for over 12

years

• Experienced CSM and CSPO, but also

consulting as a BA at clients

• CBAP, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSP, CSD

• MBA & Masters in IT help bridge the

‘chasm’ between IT & Business

• Soccer fanatic and avid cyclist

• Clayton.Dean@piperconsultinggroup.com

So… Why are we HERE?

Agile means you don’t need Business Analysts!

A Typical BA’s Situation

• Clients expect instant results…..

…in spite of years of neglect

• Overly complex systems grown by rock-pile, serving no single purpose, with no identifiable business owner

• Lack of technical ownership

• Lack of metrics

• Organizations built to

operate, but not learn

Common Agile BA Challenges

• Eliciting Requirements

• Dealing with Complexity

• Release Strategies

• Functional Ownership

• Championing the needed Changes

• Your Issues?

Mechanizing Requirements

Lack of Requirements Process

• In waterfall, all of the requirements are delivered at once so there isn’t as much focus on iterations.– Emphasis is on getting to the gate, not having quality or a

rapid, repeatable process

• But in agile, you need to deliver a frequent, steady stream of Dev-ready requirements …– When are requirements done? When they are actionable!

• This requires some sort of defined process by which ideas and desires get turned into dev-ready stories

Agile Requirements Process

• Apply same agile development concept to

your requirements process

• Define a workflow and track the flow of

requirements

• Prioritize requirements and get them to done

Agile Requirements Process

Boiling the Ocean:

Decomposing Complexity

Modeling Workflows• Many of our clients systems have complex work-

flows built over years

– It can be challenging to ‘chunk’ them down into bites

– Lack of consensus on steps/process

– Lack of ownership

• User-stories alone do not capture “flow” very

well

• Need additional tools to show how stories relate

to workflows

Modeling Workflows

• Major workflow steps /epics along the top

• Related stories under each workflow step

Modeling Workflows

Release Strategies

Release Strategy

• In waterfall, we often have single large

releases of everything. Sometimes years after

we started

• In Agile, we have the ability to release more

frequently

• But this requires that we purposely design

meaningful releases that work across the

workflow

Release Strategy• Start with simple functionality across the

entire workflow

• Add more capabilities with each release

Release Strategy

Product Roadmapping is Now Important

1. New requests come in all the

time

2. Difficult to make commitments of

scope

3. So, release on a cadence …

monthly, quarterly, etc

4. Set release goals and set timing

5. Float the scope, hit the dates

6. Interleave new functionality and

maintenance

• Monthly releases

• Some are maintenance (green), some are new dev (blue)

• Releases have high level goals

Ways to assist your CSPO

• Many CSPOs are new; understand

functionality but not IT

• Many are new to agile and don’t have

experience thinking about how to chunk up

the work

• Help your CSPO develop their IT skills

• Focus on coherent, overall, Release Strategy

Leading the Horse to Water:

Operationalizing your Client

Assess What They Do Well

• Chances are your client has a BI tool or tools that capture data, transform data and report out.

• Native at all clients is expertise. Perhaps capturing data and producing reports

• Repurposing the systems: You can harness this to help push entities to learning systems.

• The first step: “You have

to measure in order to

improve”

Repurposing Business Intelligence

• Most BI systems are a treasure trove of

operational details:

– Typical Error rates

– Number of Errors by Geographic Unit

• These become prioritized action plans:

– What to fix first

– What to train

– Which areas are doing it well – and should be emulated

– Cycle Times

Simple ExampleError Code Description Count Percent

16001 The Case is a duplicate of a record already in the Data Mart. No further action required. 316,748

17005

A duplicate Filing was received as part of a Terminated Record (to what was already Filed in the Database)

and so was not added. There is no further action required 204,115

17004

A Filing was received on a Terminated Record. It was not added to the Database. Please submit updated

Termination information, or reopen the case. 188,006

10016 Judgment For code not valid. 3,710 19.29%

10015 Filing Magistrate code not valid. 3,672 19.10%

17002

The Case being opened must have a lower sequence in the Origin field (e.g., 4 before A, before B, before C,

before D, before E, etc.). 3,134 16.30%

17001 The case attempting to be reopened has not been terminated. 2,635 13.70%

10018 Procedural progress code not valid. 1,544 8.03%

10006 Invalid filing Judge code 1,281 6.66%

10031 The Nature of Suit is not within valid date parameters, please update the NoS code to a valid value. 1,079 5.61%

18005 Reopen filing date must be greater than or equal to the termination date of the previous filing. 765 3.98%

10023 Termination Magistrate code not valid. 452 2.35%

10002 Invalid county code 208 1.08%

10019 Termination judge code not valid. 135 0.70%

9002 Invalid Jurisdiction / Nature of Suit combination 126 0.66%

10009

The reportable NOS and Jurisdiction combination is not valid for the filing date associated with the case.

Refer to Appendix A for valid combinations. 120 0.62%

10010 Invalid origin code. Origin code must be 1,2,3,4,5,6 ,or A-E. 88 0.46%

11003 Nature of suit code 860 must have an origin code of A, B, C, D, E, 3, or 4. 63 0.33%

10001 Invalid District and Office Code Combinations 33 0.17%

1017 Judgment For code value is missing. 26 0.14%

10005 Invalid Fee Status 26 0.14%

12002 Invalid termination arbitration code in term arb code field. Valid values are M, V, E or spaces. 26 0.14%

10011 Pro se must be 0,1,2 or 3. 26 0.14%

8001 Amount Received must be greater than or equal to 0 if the nature of judgment code is 1 or 2. 25 0.13%

10014 Disposition code not valid. 22 0.11%

11002 Nature of suit code 860 is only valid if the filing date is less than 05/1987. 11 0.06%

18003 Filing date must be less than or equal to the current date. 7 0.04%

12001 Invalid filing arbitration code in filing arb code field. Valid values are Y, V, M, E or spaces. 6 0.03%

14002 Civil case key invalid office. 6 0.03%

10004 Invalid defendant diversity code when jurisdiction is 4. 2 0.01%

10027 Transfer origin code not valid. 2 0.01%

19,230

Functional Ownership

and Metrics

Establishing Metrics

• Need to work with Business Owners on a daily

basis:

– If Metrics aren’t used in a daily/weekly meetings,

statuses, discussions…. Then they aren’t metrics

– Staff tends to respond to what they are asked and

what is tracked

Example: Type of Request

What’s wrong with these numbers?

CCB Priority Count Ave Days % of Total

1-Emergency 68 16 17.6%

2-Mandated 17 34 4.4%

3-High 160 66 41.5%

4-Medium 82 76 21.2%

5-Low 59 79 15.3%

Grand Total 386 60 1

• 17% of things can’t be an Emergency

• Over 60% of things are High/Mandate/ERs

• Is 386 changes over a given period acceptable?

Take-aways

• “Wants” are not dev-ready requirements, you must have a process for maturing them

• Develop release strategies that deliver value early and often and allow incremental learning

• You need more than just user-stories

• Existing systems are a trove of data and potential metrics to start the conversation(s)

• Metrics are only effective if used every day