3 things to look after for a Successful Agile Project

Every company wants to execute their software projects using Agile methodology, in fact many companies are thinking they are following Agile methodology. Agile methodology is not a one stop method to be adopted for all kinds of projects. It is a way to act promptly for changes in requirements when you are already working on requirements, these changes are derived based on rigorous user preferences study and interaction to improve the overall user experience.

I am going to discuss three important things you may want to look after for a successful agile project.

Don't keep unpredictable facts! 

This unpredictability nature of requirement changes or any other changes should have some acceptable limits to make the project successful. This needs commitment from every stake holder, that is from project sponsor, product ownership team and engineering team.

If a product owner has some thoughts on how the functionality he or she wants to see then don't wait for the feed back you are expecting from your entire user group, you can delegate the well described and documented prototype idea to your engineering team to get started and mean while try to arrive at the concrete functionality.

This approach truly follows the Agile in principle; engineering team is well engaged on the business problem, they themselves can offer some functional inputs and optimizations. And they get time to work on technical aspects and improvisations such as solution performance, browser compatibility, enabling multilingual, scalability etc.

Allocate sufficient time and money for training and learning resources

Make sure every member in your team has good understanding of the business domain you are into and business problems you are addressing. 

Utilize the team wiki to communicate commonly used procedures, keep it simple and effective to maintain and add content quickly. Keep links to latest training/ recordings for new comers and for reference.

Provide access to test/development environment at the earliest to allow individuals try the learning's and become confident and ready.

Simple and effective tracking

Requirements should be documented with sufficient details to help Engineering team to refer and infer. Whenever a change happens it should be documented and  communicated to all the stake holders.   

Leverage the Requirement and bug tracking tools and their capability to send notifications up on changes. This ensures people involved are kept informed about the current state.