Agile Requirements
Hi everybody!
In my company, we have a concept of requirements. The requirement must go through the following chain: (QA approval > Management approval > Regulatory approval > Active)
While I would love to save the same kind of chain, which is important for the requirements, I'd like to improve that workflow to be more agile. That chain is crucial to follow, but too long and impacts the metrics of my team. Have you encountered this before and how did you solve it? Is there a possibility to make that chain more agile while also saving all these steps?
Why do you actually want to save these prescriptive steps, instead of running empirical experiments and learning to build the right thing at the right time?
Hi Ian and thanks so much for getting back and noticing this!
The problem is that I work in the industry which needs to be highly regulated, and we have some obligations we must respect. This one is tricky: I do want this review process to be faster (considering there are people globally involved), but at the same time having all the chain gone through. Any ideas are welcomed!
My advice is to think of it the other way round. If agile outcomes are expected, regulators may have obligations which they need to respect.
Are those authorities aware, for example, that right now they share in the accountability for ensuring work is Done? Perhaps transparency is needed over the commitments of Scrum Developers, who those Developers actually are, and the teamwork which they ought to demonstrate.
Why do you need to go through this process as a chain? A chain implies a sequence. Are there reasons people with the ability to speak regarding quality assurance, regulatory concerns, and management cannot collaborate on a regular, ongoing basis? Having this kind of collaboration can help to build quality into all the activities and eliminate delays that are associated with reviews, approvals, and rework.
Hey Li,
We can't always navigate away from the mandated policy of an organization especially around regulatory compliance or quality assurance, so I would say take a page out of the quality handbook.
Map out the process and identify areas for delays, outline the length of time for the actual activity versus the duration it takes at each step for the activity to be actioned and completed. Look to resolve those delays and present a proposal. Reducing that process should also have a cost associated with it, which you can highlight and help your company out overall.
Ideally it would be great to change the process altogether to be more "Agile" but one person in a rigid company can't easily accomplish this and could be job impacting if there is no support for it.
As we see from the statement above, direct comes of why don't you... don't really help your situation so I hope this advice does.
Keep striving to be more agile and even if it's one tiny piece at a time.