I’ve been reading up on the value of innovation, in preparation for the Value seminar by Tom Gilb in London this week. One question for Agile teams is how to innovate within the constant pressure of “Sprinting” and barely having time to draw breath.
Imagine an investment bank running with the following scenario:
Manager:
“Hi team, we are putting in place a new process for you to help us be more predictable and control our budget and schedules over the next year. By the end of December, we want you to hand in a plan that tells us:
To help you, we will be monitoring the progress every few months to ensure you have made the trades you committed to, on time and on budget.
If you find that a trade is no longer worth executing, please submit a change request form and get sign-off from your manager to remove the trade. If you would like to add a make a new trade that is not on your trading plan, please fill out a separate change request form and send it to your manager. When you are trading on behalf of external clients, please ensure you also get your legal counsel to make the changes to the contract and sign-off on it before executing any new trades not covered in your annual trading plan.
Please send any comments or questions to your manager and we will endeavor to answer them in a timely fashion.
While the scenario above is clearly insane due to changing market conditions and decisions that need to be made in microseconds rather than a year in advance, do they do exactly this with their product teams?