[Sigia-l] How the design process fits into the agile methodology

[Livia Labate]

David Malouf wrote:
> Isn't that just a waterfall process?
> Design done upfront and then development?

Only if you're assuming it stops after that. If this is framed within a 
larger context of iteration and refinement over time, the agile nature 
of the development really only speaks to the development cycle - which I 
think is ideal.

Here's a little scenario:

I work in a very large group. My team (Information Architecture and 
Usability) is responsible for two core aspects of the overall product 
development: 1) modeling the experience and 2) user research and validation.

In addition to us and the engineering/development team, we have a design 
team that focuses on the nitty gritty of the interfaces and an 
operations team that's responsible for making things live after they've 
been completed. Finally, we have a project management team in a 
supporting role, making sure things are moving along and get delivered.

For a long time we struggled with a way to describe a process that would 
support all these teams in their core responsibilities. We decided to 
adopt "a" process to see how it would work. We chose PMI (project 
Management Institute's) standard 4-phases:

Initiation > Planning > Execution > Closure

The focus is on delivery (that's why our certified PMPs love), which is 
great because our big difficulty was in managing our project portfolio. 
This gave us enough structure (each phase exit is formalized) and 
visibility into what's going on across our extended group (you can't 
manage what you can't measure - which is where we were before).

This allowed us to get a handle on things without constraining the 
responsibilities of any of the teams (which I very much appreciate). 
Soon after, the engineering and development team decided they needed 
some order and adopted an agile process using development sprints. That 
reinforced the PMI model (execution phase).

Now we are at the point where I'm making a move to consolidate the 
practices of the IA and Usability team responsibilities - because the 
business units we provide services too are very heterogenous in terms of 
quality (of people doing the work, approaches, goals, etc), that's our 
core difficulty, so I'm positioning this "modeling" work as the core 
activity in the 'Initiation' phase.

The user research work I'm building into the modeling as needed and the 
user validation (mostly usability testing), runs on a parallel track. 
It's key that my team has both responsibilities because running this in 
parallel means that the next round we'll use the findings early on 
during "Initiation".

We've only been doing this for a couple of months so I can't tell you 
what the long-term implications are, but it has definitely started to 
help communicate what we do, how we are aligned with the other teams and 
set the right expectations for everyone.

My conclusion is that agile development is great overall - more directly 
intertwined with design activities in a small-team context, but just as 
supportive of design activities in a large team context - just with a 
different context and people involved. I do feel there is a need to have 
the larger process described somehow (PMI works for us).

If you'd like to hear more about how this is working out, come check out 
the process panel on this very topic at the IA Summit 07 in Las Vegas, 
March 22-26!

	Where does IA fit in the design process?
	http://tinyurl.com/3d9vnp

Cheers,

Livia Labate