A development team, over sprint planning sessions and with games like planning poker, would decompose the epic into smaller stories that could be completed within a single sprint. Originally, “epics” were understood as one, giant user story, basically a big chunk of work that couldn’t be completed within one sprint. With this background, let’s break down just what an epic is, and the role it serves within an organization. Striking this balance means incorporating epics into the mix as well. It needs a method that also keeps a keen eye on the bottom line, that considers business objectives a system that takes an inside-out and an outside-in approach at the same time. In order to be a going-concern, then, a business cannot entirely embrace this outside-in approach, to the exclusion of other perspectives. In short, agile, in some respects anyway, poses a huge business risk. A change in the client’s request mid-way into a project might require architecture or skills that the company doesn’t possess. A project that is slated to last three months may well extend into six, as requirements and client’s needs change. The agile approach, in essence, means that the company loses control over significant things like scope and budget. Agile even goes so far as to “welcome changing requirements, even late in development,” as it states in its Manifesto. With this outside-in approach, the organization caters to the whims and preferences of the client, which it can’t ever pin down or know entirely. Its revolutionary approach really makes end products more effective.īut it isn’t entirely perfect. Agile, then, isn’t just about increasing efficiency. The agile method yielded user-friendly software products that solved user problems, and included innovative features the users enjoyed. It achieves this outside-in orientation with “user stories,” which outlines a task from the perspective of the end user, first defining how the task serves a user’s need, then working backward to outline what the task must consist of. As the Agile Manifesto states, it seeks “openness to change over following a plan,” meaning that it pivots and adjusts based on the feedback it receives during the project from end users. Rather than making hard and fast decisions at the start, and deciding for themselves what the end user needs or wants, the agile method allows a project to bend and flow, soliciting feedback from the end user continually. Time and time again, they would emerge, after months of tireless and diligent work, with a product that the customer didn’t like and didn’t use.Īgile set out to change what it saw as a fundamentally flawed system by taking an outside-in approach to project planning. The waterfall approach carefully planned everything at the start, and then the team went into a black box to see the plan through. The agile revolution back in the 90s fueled itself on a plenteous stream of frustrating and failed projects. Wondering just how and where an epic fits into the agile puzzle? That’s what we’re going to break down in this post. And one central artifact within this mix is an epic. Just how does the agile method work? It arranges several artifacts together into what almost looks like a three-dimensional game of Tetris. And agile has come up with one that delicately pulls this feat off. To hone in on one area so often means completely ignoring another, and then everything veers off track. It means weaving these multiple tensions together, and coordinating various objectives within one initiative.Īnd this is no small challenge. Getting it all right means meeting business objectives, aligning skills and resources, and solving user problems all at the same time. And in any large organization, mis-management and waste of resources always poses a huge risk. At the other extreme, the team might set out to solve the client’s problem, only to realize mid-way that it doesn’t have the capacity to complete the project. The software team might hunker down and develop an innovative product, only to discover that it’s not what the user wants. The Role of Epics in Agile Project ManagementĪ complex project can derail in so many ways.
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