| Creating a Fast and Flexible Process:
Research suggests Keys to Success  Alan MacCormack, a professor at
Harvard Business School, was studying successful software development processes. He and
his colleagues asked executives at a software firm to provide two case examples, one from
a "good" project, and another from a "bad" one. Two projects were
identified, each of which yielded products that had just shipped. Observing the state of
these products over time, MacCormack and his researchers saw that the "good"
project failed in terms of such factors as market acceptance, expert quality rating, and
productivity. According to MacCormack, the project that management said was a good project
"turned out to be uniformly bad," while the project that executives said was
"bad" was a marketplace success.
MacCormack discovered that what executives judged to be a
"good" project was one where the specification was completed up front, where the
design had been frozen, and the project had been executed fairly efficiently. For
executives, a "good" project was one that built the product that it set out to
build. A "bad" project, according to executives, was one in which the final
results ended up looking completely different than what they set out to build. And yet the
market reaction to the project that had gone through continual change was much better than
the project that had a design that was frozen in time. Says MacCormack, "The way
they thought about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in that case was completely upside
down. The people who were overseeing projects there assumed that the good projects were
the ones that delivered to the spec. In fact, good projects are ones that deliver to the
market."
MacCormack’s ongoing empirical research into flexible
product development processes has yielded a number of important insights into how these
types of processes work, and how they can be leveraged to deliver successful products to
the marketplace.
Flexible Processes: A Response to Uncertainty
A flexible process is one in which a great deal is unknown at
the beginning of the project. As a result, these processes are designed to manage uncertainty.
Says MacCormack, "There are some uncertainties that are irreducible. A lot of
product development theory is predicated on the idea that you can eliminate uncertainty up
front in development, and then it becomes a routine task. There are some environments
where that is not the case. During the execution of the project, you actually have to be
good at learning about things that you have no past experience of."
The aim of the more traditional methods, claims MacCormack,
is to stamp out uncertainty. A flexible process, however, doesn’t only tolerate
uncertainty – it actively builds a process around it. MacCormack finds that different
product development practices bring different benefits depending on the level – and
the source – of uncertainty. Explains MacCormack, "If you face high market
uncertainty, then you get much more benefits from an early beta release than if the
uncertainty is...more around the technologies inside the product. I call this a contingent
approach to development where you say, at the beginning of development, that the first
phase of a project should not be concerned with product design. It should be concerned
with process design. [In flexible processes] the first question is ‘What type of
uncertainty do we face?’ And given the levels and sources of uncertainty, what is the
appropriate process for us to use?" A further complexity is introduced by the
fact that on any given project, the source of uncertainty may change.
Evolutionary Delivery: Generate a Small Number of
Features…that Work
MacCormack’s research suggests that one of the hallmarks
of flexible development is that it seeks to create a working version of the product as
early as possible. Rather than creating the entire product prior to market testing it, a
functional version of the system is created, but with only a portion of the feature set.
MacCormack explains that these early beta versions are not computer mock-ups, or wooden or
clay models, that are thrown away after use, but a working version of the system.
This evolutionary delivery model of development,
explains MacCormack, "means a change in mindset because usually we write out the
features that are going to be in the final version of a product and then we allocate the
team to all the features. Sometime in the long-term future we get together and put it back
together. When your aim is to deliver some of the functionality early, you can’t
organize tasks like that. You have to prioritize the features up front in development and
work mostly on the essence of the system. And then once you have the essence of the system
down, you can work on the other features."
MacCormack recognizes that there is likely to be resistance
to the idea of starting development before having a complete specification. But in highly
uncertain environments, particularly, MacCormack feels that the greater danger is that, "You
can create the whole [product] and find no one wants it." MacCormack found that,
on average, the software projects he studied were first tested with early beta versions
that had about 70% of their full functionality.
In order to move toward a more flexible process,
incorporating the evolutionary delivery model, MacCormack suggests the following approach:
"Take your typical project and identify the point at which you first get meaningful,
high-fidelity feedback on the performance of the product, in the end use context, and then
say, ‘what is to stop us getting that feedback half as early again?’ By asking
this question, you identify the main obstacles that you need to work on to get your
process to be more flexible."
Four Key Elements of Fast and Flexible Design
In addition to the evolutionary delivery model,
MacCormack’s work has identified four constructs that underlie a more flexible
process.
- Generating information during development –
particularly from customers
- Responding to that information during the development
process – and not in the next ‘rev’
- Integrating the team around the new models of
flexibility and responsiveness
- Architecting the product for rapid responsiveness
Generating
One of the most important skills in the domain of flexible
processes is the ability to generate new information. "The biggest lesson we
discovered from this research, and the other case examples we’ve had from
non-software industries, is the concept of breaking up a project into milestones and
getting interim feedback on the performance of the design as much as possible…front
loading that feedback…finding out information as early as possible in a
project," says MacCormack. The ideal, he claims, is a version of the product in
the hands of customers. "There are certain types of products where limitations
prevent that from happening, so then you’re really looking for the next best high
fidelity feedback you can get...in the end market context."
Responding
Once a conduit has been created between the customers, the
performance of the design, and the development team, the next step is to build
responsiveness to that data into the process. The idea here is to reduce the time between
receiving the feedback and the design of new tests that will provide even more
information. MacCormack’s research suggests that it isn’t the aggregate
experimental capacity that is the key element, but the ability to get feedback rapidly and
to turn that feedback into new design experiments – and new designs. MacCormack
suggests that companies invest in infrastructure that allows them to create value from the
stream of information they generate from customers.
Integrating
Integrating the stream of information created by a flexible
process is no easy task. It requires a team structure that will allow the right decisions
to be made on the fly. One way this is done, according to MacCormack, is to pinpoint one
person with the role of integration. This point person will be responsible for making the
hard decisions regarding triaging features, deciding which bugs most need fixing, and
sequencing tasks. "In a traditional process," explains MacCormack, "most
of this is figured out ahead of time, so there is less need for this role. In a flexible
process, you are going to have to make real-time decisions…Somebody anointed with
that responsibility is needed because [now] you’ve got those big decisions to
make."
Architectural Design
According to MacCormack’s findings, product performance
and process flexibility are intertwined through their relationship with the product
architecture. Observes MacCormack, "In a normal project, when no one cares about
flexibility, engineers will come up with spectacular solutions that tend to be very hard
to change." In many cases, the most efficient design is one in which sub-systems
are coupled together tightly. But, in a flexible process, says MacCormack, "I
don’t want the best performing design if it means I have to wait a year. I actually
don’t mind giving back a little of the theoretical in exchange for being able to
demonstrate a part of this product a third of the way through the project."
The key, according to MacCormack, is to view product
architecture not from the standpoint of design but from the standpoint of rapidly creating
a partially functional early version of the product. The question, says MacCormack, is to
focus on the point at which an early beta version can be made available. If this time-to-first-beta
can be reduced by 50%, the design implications are such that "it will force a
series of decisions on people in terms of the architecture."
Finally, MacCormack also found that changing the culture,
from a "freeze the spec early," "late changes are always
bad" mindset, to a fast and flexible mindset, is probably the most difficult
thing. It’s very difficult for many developers to swallow the idea that design
changes could be "good." But design changes can be the life’s blood of a
successful flexible process, "because," concludes MacCormack, "it
means you are reacting to information you receive. In [more traditional] processes you
just ignore it."
This article originally appeared
in the August 2003 issue of PDBPR
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ALAN MACCORMACK