Chapter 5
Start Your Agile Project Right

When it’s time to go to work, do you drive in any given direction without a destination? When you have the time and flexibility you might decide to explore a new area, but when going to work? Probably not.

Projects need direction, too. Project teams—for all projects—need to know where they are headed and when they are done. This business of selecting the direction for a project and knowing when the project is done is part of starting the project right.

Let’s talk about products for a minute. Every product has an introduction, several releases, and an end of life, when you retire the product. Every single one of those major events for a product is a project. When you introduce a product as “1.0,” that’s the introduction. You might have 1.5 as a minor release project and 2.0 as a major release project. Notice that I called them both projects.

Because the team can deliver value all the way through the project, sometimes people don’t think they have projects in agile approaches. They do. Here’s the key: when teams use agile approaches, you don’t have to wait until the end of the release to see the value in the project. Your team might be able to release every day, or every couple of weeks, or every month. Those releases allow the customers to receive interim value for the project.

Also notice that I spoke about major and minor releases and our ability to release value. I am using the same word, release, in two different ways. That’s part of the problem. Agile approaches allow us to release interim value as often as possible to our customers. And you still have projects you might call “Release 1.0,” which is the project name for a product. Thinking about projects can be especially important if you have a product with hardware. You might have production stages at the end of the project. And you can still have an agile project with hardware and mechanical parts or products.

In this chapter, I’ll discuss how you can start your project right, including understanding your context and risks. First, we’ll examine why chartering a project is an important first step in starting a project right.