DSDM Atern is an Agile project management approach. I’m happy to hold my hands up and say I know very little about Agile, which is why I was grateful to attend some of the Agile Business Conference in London earlier this month.
Keith Richards, Director of KRC and author of Agile Project Management, explained what DSDM is all about.
A traditional way of managing projects involves fixing the scope and varying the time, cost and quality to achieve those deliverables. DSDM is different: you agree the time and the cost and then vary the scope accordingly to make sure you hit those targets. “The benefits of being on time are phenomenal,” he said. If you are on time you can plan, people know what is happening and you can cut cost. “The biggest single thing we compromise on our projects is testing,” he explained. “Because it’s the last thing.”
This approach to time and budgets makes Agile a very cost-effective way to do things, but you run the risk of not getting everything you want from the project first time round.
“You spend all your time playing with the scope,” explained Richards. “It’s quite normal to be descoping early on.” He recommended using the MOSCOW technique to prioritise requirements, and using what he called ‘The Spice Girls Rule’. “Tell me what you want, what you really, really want,” he said. “Focus on the business need and requirements gathering.”
DSDM also uses a lot of facilitated workshops to improve communication flow through the people involved in the project and help move things forward quickly. “The habit is to go down the email route,” he said, “It’s very hard to communicate with just the written word. Go visual with your planning. The more tactile, the more visual it is, it’s a great way of showing control.” He advocated building prototypes or models where appropriate to demonstrate functionality in a very hands-on way.
Richards explained that Agile approaches tend to avoid the project management layer, but for complex projects that just wouldn’t work. “Once you go above one team you need a project manager, it won’t happen on it’s own,” he said. Big projects can’t cope with little scrum teams that are not coordinated. Every project, he explained, has three levels: governance, project management and solutions delivery.
There are benefits of using DSDM as an Agile approach. Projects deliver on time. The approach creates ownership. It’s easier to implement and support solutions. But it does take some work to get right. While the method is holistic, you need to be able to apply it in an intelligent way. “If you decide to drop the eggs out of a cake, you don’t get a cake,” Richards said. You can replace them with something else, but you need to know what you’re doing.
After listening to Richards talk about the DSDM way of doing things, I have a better understanding of what Agile is. I still don’t get how it can work with non-software development projects, or how using software designed for traditional project management practices like Seavus Project Planner, but I got assurances at the conference that it will work – somehow.