Description

Historically Nationwide’s software development lifecycle has been largely Waterfall.  Nationwide has been migrating to agile practices for application development but has not adjusted the requirements elicitation process.  Due to the mismatch of methodologies, the agile teams often experienced requirements wait states of idle time waiting for delivery of the requirements backlog.  The delivery of the project’s business value was elongated due to the tedious manner the requirements were elicited by projecting spreadsheets to generate conversation to capture the business requirements.

The Agile Manifesto indicates value of conversation over documentation, and advocates a big visible culture.  In this spirit, Nationwide revised the software requirements elicitation process to incorporate these tenets to be more visual and collaborative.  The outcome was an iterative requirements elicitation process, which utilizes facilitation best practices to actively engage participants to deliver the requirements backlog incrementally to the agile application development team in an expedited collaborative manner.

Key Results Achieved

Key results achieved include:

• Conducted engaging visually facilitated requirements elicitation sessions

• Reduced the time to get the requirements backlog to agile application development team

• Delivered an incremental requirements backlog

• Enabled the incremental delivery of business value
   

  ---

  Sponsor: Brian Smith
  VP Delivery Services
  Facilitator: Jennifer Bentley Director of IT,
  Connie Kobal IT Analysis, Mary Rinehart IT Analyst Manage

  ---