Managing complexity of discovery phases

About this Case Study

The discovery phase is often thought of as a one-off process that takes place at the start of a new client engagement. In reality, discovery phases have far more to offer - they can prove to be enormously beneficial as any discrete chunk of work begins. What's more, they can deliver these benefits via lightweight techniques that won't add significant overhead to your project.

This session draws on a couple of real-world examples to show how this approach can mitigate project risk, keep quality high and build a trusting client relationship from day one.

Taking as examples real greenfield and brownfield projects, the session describes how agile delivery can address the challenge of getting quickly to grips with complex project domains by using a range of lean tools and techniques as part of a structured discovery or inception phase.

In the case of the greenfield project, the goal was to build sufficient understanding to be able to define a valuable and realistic release (MVP) roadmap. For the brownfield project, the challenge was more about decomposing/splitting an existing monolithic application in the right way.

Besides illustrating how these challenges were addressed in practice, this session will outline a generic discovery/inception framework and suggest a range of techniques, tools and methodologies. Agile teams can use these to compose a skeleton framework to address the challenges they face in their projects and deliver value early while staying close to user and business needs.

About the Speaker

Marcel Britsch is an independent digital consultant, product owner and business analyst. Born in Germany, he has been living and working in London for over 15 years. He has worked with creatively and technically focused agencies and all sorts of clients across a wide variety of industry sectors including retail, automotive, finance, medical and energy.

He believes that project success is strongly linked to happy teams, value-focused decision-making and fast feedback cycles. As part of his role, he is passionate about finding the best tools and techniques to optimise team culture, ways of working and solution design.

He considers projects that follow classic waterfall/big design up-front practices to be too likely to be doomed to go anywhere near them, and will also stay away from transformation projects that are solely based on coaching. But he has and will happily help organisations transform via practical involvement and by example.

Outside of work, Marcel is interested in sci-fi and comic books, Theravada Buddhist mediation and number theory. He is currently working with Equal Experts, and can be best contacted via thedigitalbusinessanalyst.com or LinkedIn.

 marcelbritsch