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Agile has rapidly spread throughout the business world, experienced in every industry and organization. Agile epics, in turn, have helped teams scale their effort-delivery to meet business objectives efficiently. While it could sound simple in words, creating an agile epic is a complex, multi-stage process that involves a range of stakeholders across multiple levels.
Agile development has become increasingly popular in recent years, largely due to its flexibility and ability to adapt to changing requirements. One of the key components of agile development is the use of epics. Epics are essentially large and complicated efforts that improve organizational or enterprise priorities. They are used to define high-level requirements that are completed over several sprints, with each sprint contributing towards the broader objective.
One of the main advantages of using epics in agile development is that it allows for the acceleration of delivery. By breaking down huge projects into smaller, more manageable pieces, teams can work more efficiently and effectively. This is particularly true when it comes to scaling the delivery process, as epics can help to ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal.
To understand the role of epics in agile development, it's important to first understand the agile framework. At its core, agile is a value-driven approach that prioritizes people, delivery, collaboration, and improving the customer experience. The agile manifesto is made up of four guiding principles that underpin this approach:
These principles can be applied to various agile methods, such as Scrum, Kanban, and XP. All agile methods share these four inherent values, which are designed to help teams work more effectively and efficiently.
So, what are the key components of agile epics? There are several elements that are fundamental to their composition:
By following these key components, teams can ensure that they are working towards a common goal, while still maintaining the flexibility and adaptability that is so important in agile development.
Agile methodology has become increasingly popular among organizations, and Agile epics have become an essential part of the process. Agile epics are a collection of user stories that describe a large project or initiative. They help in breaking down complex projects into smaller, more manageable parts, making it easier for the team to work on them. The benefits of developing Agile epics are significant, including:
Agile epics provide the agile team with improved alignment to strategic goals. They provide transparency on broad objectives and rank the projects according to the level of priority. This allows teams to focus on the most critical objectives and work towards them. By aligning the team with the organization's strategic goals, the team can work towards the same vision and achieve success together.
Large-scale projects can be challenging to manage, but with Agile epics, teams can break up large projects into compartments and define workable, achievable project objectives. This approach leads to better execution and delivery through the continuous delivery of smaller milestones. It allows the team to focus on smaller, achievable goals, which ultimately lead to the successful completion of the larger project.
Agile methodology fosters collaboration and communication between different departments within an organization. Epics allow them to work together on the same goals, reach a shared understanding, and achieve success together. Collaboration and communication are essential in Agile, and Agile epics facilitate this by providing a shared understanding of the project's objectives and priorities. It helps in breaking down silos and building a culture of collaboration and teamwork.
In conclusion, Agile epics are an essential part of Agile methodology. They help in aligning teams with strategic goals, managing large-scale projects, and facilitating collaboration and communication. By breaking down complex projects into smaller, more manageable parts, Agile epics make it easier for teams to work on them and achieve success.
Creating an agile epic takes place in several stages, with each stage contributing a unique feature to the Epic’s completion. Here is a summary of the stages:
At the early stage of the epic development, there is the identification of the scope and objective. This is done with a clear and concise outline of the project’s business objectives: projected cost, revenue, and user behaviour.
It is essential to identify the scope and objectives of the project early on to ensure that the project is aligned with the organization's goals. The identification of the project's scope and objectives helps to set the direction of the project and provides a clear understanding of what needs to be achieved.
During this stage, it is also crucial to identify the stakeholders involved in the project and their expectations. This helps to ensure that the project meets the needs of all stakeholders and that there is buy-in from all parties involved.
The epic statement is like a book summary; it highlights the executive’s perspective on the project and summarizes the potential project outcomes. It helps align all stakeholders to the project’s strategic goals and desire outcomes. A typical epic statement contains elements such as the problem/requirement statement, motivation, solution proposal, and a high-level estimate of the effort.
The epic statement is a critical component of the agile epic development process. It provides a clear understanding of the project's goals and objectives and helps to align all stakeholders to the project's strategic goals and desired outcomes. It is essential to ensure that the epic statement is concise, clear, and easy to understand to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page.
When an organization has a robust epic statement, the next stage is generating a Value-Effort prioritization score and planning a rough order of magnitude estimate (ROM). The Value-Effort Project prioritization score is easy to use, provides a consistent framework for assessing projects, and offers an opportunity of comparing projects of different sizes and in different contexts.
Prioritizing and estimating effort is a critical component of the agile epic development process. It helps to ensure that the project is delivered on time, within budget, and meets the expectations of all stakeholders. It is essential to prioritize the project based on its value and effort required to ensure that the most critical features are delivered first.
During this stage, it is also crucial to estimate the effort required to complete the project. This helps to ensure that the project is properly resourced and that the team has a clear understanding of what needs to be achieved.
In conclusion, creating an agile epic is a complex process that requires careful planning, prioritization, and estimation. By following the stages outlined above, organizations can ensure that their projects are aligned with their goals, delivered on time, and meet the expectations of all stakeholders.
After creating agile epics, we can break them down into smaller work items of analysis and delivery via user stories. User stories embody a small, testable feature that can be delivered at the end of an iteration or increment. The stories illustrate features or requirements of value for specific users or stakeholders that will receive value from the project. User stories are broken down further until a manageable task size is reached, ensuring progress and delivery every sprint, as well as making the feature available for feedback to users and stakeholders. This process is crucial for the success of any agile project, as it allows for the efficient and effective delivery of value to the end-users.
User stories play a vital role in agile project management. They break up large and complicated use cases into user-centric features that can be created, delivered, and tested in one sprint or iteration. This approach ensures that the project team is delivering value to the end-users at every stage of the project, rather than waiting until the end to deliver a large, complex feature that may not meet the needs of the users. By breaking down epics into user stories, the project team can focus on delivering small, manageable work packages that can be completed within a short period, ensuring the successful delivery and management of an agile epic.
There are several techniques for decomposing Agile Epics. The primary pain point is figuring out how to split the epic into smaller pieces without creating dependencies, re-working tasks, and re-negotiating priorities. Some of the common techniques of decomposition include:
By using these techniques, the project team can ensure that the user stories are aligned with the epic and that the features are delivered in a way that meets the needs of the end-users.
To ensure alignment of user stories with epics, it is essential to create a mapping system where each user story defined aligns with an Agile Epic’s strategic objectives. This mapping system helps the project team to ensure that the user stories are aligned with the overall goals of the project and that the features delivered meet the needs of the end-users. By aligning the user stories with the epic, the project team can ensure that they are delivering value to the end-users at every stage of the project.
Agile Epics accelerate the delivery of large-scale projects with an extensive stakeholder project with complex business demands. The acceptance of Agile Epics among Agile teams is a technique to scale their work and speed up delivery. Creating an Agile Epic necessitates considerable effort and involves several stages, from identifying the project’s scope and objectives to breaking down efforts into smaller work packages that can be delivered incrementally. While teams must have the necessary expertise and support to achieve high-quality Agile delivery through a well-defined roadmap of epics, user stories, and sprints, Agile Epics provide substantial benefits to organizations that adopt them.