Category: Agile

Table of Contents

• Part 0: Overview
• Part 1: What is Agile, Anyway?
• Part 2: What’s Your Problem?
• Part 3: Agile Contracts and the Downfall of Requirements
• Part 4: Digital Transformation
• Part 5: Agility on Large, Complex Programs (you’re here!)

Putting it all together

In this series we’ve introduced agile concepts, requirements, contracting, and digital engineering (DE) for physical systems. These things are all enablers to agility, they don’t make a program agile per se. The key for agility is how the program is planned and functions prioritized.

Agile program planning

A traditional waterfall program is planned using the Statement of Work (SOW), Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), and Integrated Master Schedule (IMS). This basically requires scheduling all of the work before the project starts, considering dependencies, key milestones, etc. Teams know what to work on because the schedule tells them what they’ll be working on when. At least in theory.

Table of Contents

• Part 0: Overview
• Part 1: What is Agile, Anyway?
• Part 2: What’s Your Problem?
• Part 3: Agile Contracts and the Downfall of Requirements
• Part 4: Digital Transformation (you’re here!)
• Part 5: Agility on Large, Complex Programs

A quick detour

This article is a quick detour on an important enabler for agile systems engineering. “Digital transformation” means re-imagining the way businesses operate in the digital age, including how we engineer systems. As future articles discuss scaling agile practices to larger and more complex systems, it will be very helpful to understand the possibilities that digital engineering unlocks.

Digital engineering enables the agile revolution

The knee-jerk reaction to agile systems engineering is this: “sure, agile is great for the speed and flexibility of software development, but there’s just no way to apply it to hardware systems”. Objections range from development times to lead times to the cost of producing physical prototypes.

Table of Contents

• Part 0: Overview
• Part 1: What is Agile, Anyway?
• Part 2: What’s Your Problem?
• Part 3: Agile Contracts and the Downfall of Requirements (you’re here!)
• Part 4: Digital Transformation
• Part 5: Agility on Large, Complex Programs

The antithesis of agile

Requirements are a poor way to acquire a system. They’re great in theory, but frequently fail in practice. Writing good requirements is hard, much harder than you’d think if you’ve never had the opportunity. Ivy Hooks gives several examples of good and bad requirements in the paper “Writing Good Requirements“. Poor requirements can unnecessarily constrain the design, be interpreted incorrectly, and pose challenges for verification. Over-specification results in spending on capabilities that aren’t really needed while under-specification can result in a final product that doesn’t provide all of the required functions.

If writing one requirement is hard, try scaling it up to an entire complex system. Requirements-based acquisition rests on the assumption that the specification and statement of work are complete, consistent, and effective. That requires a great deal of up-front work with limited opportunity to correct issues found later. A 2015 GAO report found that “DoD often does not perform sufficient up-front requirements analysis”, leading to “cost, schedule, and performance problems”.

Table of Contents

• Part 0: Overview
• Part 1: What is Agile, Anyway?
• Part 2: What’s Your Problem? (you’re here!)
• Part 3: Agile Contracts and the Downfall of Requirements
• Part 4: Digital Transformation
• Part 5: Agility on Large, Complex Programs

A faster horse

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Apocryphally attributed to Henry Ford¹

When people trot out that quote they’re often trying to make the point that seeking user feedback will only constrain the design because our small-minded <sneer>users</sneer> cannot possibly think outside the box. I disagree with that approach. User feedback is valuable information. It should not constrain the design, but it is essential to be able to understand and empathize with your users. They say “faster horse”? It’s your job to generalize and innovate on that desire to come up with a car. The problem with the “singular visionary” approach is that for every wildly successful visionary there are a dozen more with equally innovative ideas that didn’t find a market.