Value-Driven Development with “Continuous Discovery”

Discovery workshops are an exciting time. The workshop phase is when you first get to learn about your client’s business and key stakeholder visions. This is when you begin to build up a picture of success for your project. It’s a fast-paced time for you to dip into business values, but in order to deliver solutions—solutions that deliver on the expectations set in the discovery—you have to pursue an ongoing learning process. Simply put: you need to dive into the client’s business needs and immerse yourself.

This session is about how to ensure that business values are communicated effectively throughout all the phases of architecture, development, and delivery.

Inherent Risks with Product Development

1. Cost estimates are imperfect, and are always wrong. Over/under is a concern, but ultimately, they’re still wrong.

2. The perceived values for the business (and end user) evolves over time. Priorities change.

3. Shared documentation does not mean shared understanding. Communicating business values to developers is fundamentally hard.

Minimize Risk with Continuous Discovery

In this presentation, we’ll discuss WHY experts recommend continuous discovery and backlog grooming, which is focused on delivering business value. .

Scrum encourages requirements to be discovered and detailed throughout the project’s development, but in long term projects, it’s difficult to keep track of the big picture in terms of value. When pursuing agile iterative development, it’s important to track how requirements evolve over time. Continuous discovery processes allow both stakeholders and developers to share the ongoing storytelling experience throughout the project. Just like any good story, it changes as it’s retold. Requirements change as more collaborators join in the process, and the delivery of business value can be multiplied even further as developers share ideas on cost-effective solutions. Solutions which focus on value delivery rather than specification delivery.

Agile delivery means agile opportunity for learning about client values and the intended target for the product solution. Each delivery (release, demo) should be tied back to the business values and scored against the intended solution. In this way, we pursue continuous learning and mitigate risks for both the delivery team and stakeholders.