How do you Kick Start a New Idea? - The Inception Journey

New ideas abound.  We all have them and play the 'What-if' game.  Yet, we wonder: is that really viable?  So we hesitate, second guess, procrastinate, and eventually move on.  Wouldn't it be easier if could test our ideas to check viability.  One day, a good friend, Jon, and I were discussing some new ideas.  Our main concern was: how do we check these?  So we tried some things and arrived at a pattern. We called it the Inception Journey.

  

Our Inception Journey pattern is not really new.  We have seen elements of this pattern in other inception  patterns.  But we have not seen it presented as a simple step by step series of questions.  Here it is.

Inception Journey

Clarify Idea - … Elevator Pitch or Pirate Metrics Canvas or something similar

MVPOC (Minimum Viable Proof Of Concept) - Tipping points to proceed

• Outcomes:

• O1: Viable idea to clients

• O2: ~ 10x clients to creators

• O3: Clients' validated potential engagement 

• Q: What is the minimum we can do to convince ourselves there is any clientele for our idea?

• Q1: What is the problem we are trying to solve?

• Q2: What is the 'new' idea we want to try?

• Q3: Who is the targeted clientele?

• Q4: How are we going to validate their potential engagement?

• Q5: How are we going to validate our new idea?

• Q6: What is that minimum experiment/activity to try?

Decide Next Steps - Proceed / Pivot / Punt 

• Retro - Collect feedback and learnings from MVPOC 

• Proceed - MVPOC was successful enough to go forward

• Pivot - MVPOC indicated need for major changes to 

• Rerun MVPOC with changes

•      Punt - Go back to the start, find new idea and new MVPOC

Define Vision to Proceed - Vision Statement 

• From Vision start building Backlog in 'Tool'

• Recruit & Charter an Agile Team to do the work

Inception Journey by Jon Jorgensen and Paul Pazderski is licensed under CC BY-SA 4

What – What is Chunking

Chunking is a simplification strategy.   We can chunk down or chunk up.

Chunking down decomposes complex things into simpler things; big into small; whole into parts; components into sub-components; assemblies into sub-assemblies; systems into sub-systems; etc.

Chunking up works in the reverse direction by combining smaller parts into bigger ones, and so forth.

Chunking is reiterative, recursive, and incremental.  But at each stage the chunks are different, so it is like a fractal.

DONE.

What - What is the Zen of Agile

The Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/) encapsulates the Zen of Agile.  By Zen, I mean essence, basis, foundation, definition, core, etc.  In the Agile Manifesto the Zen concepts are: discovery (finding and learning), improvement (making things and processes better), empiricism (direct experience), sharing (helping and learning with others) and of course software development.  The first sentence of the Agile Manifesto encapsulates all these: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” 

And please notice, the Agile movement is now evolving beyond just developing software.  It is going main-stream.

The rest of the Agile Manifesto, the 4 Agile Values and the 12 Agile Principles, then builds on these Zen concepts. 

FYI – I will explore these in future posts.

Live Agile to be Agile. 

DONE.

What - What is an Agile Pattern

A pattern is a discernible regularity in nature or in a man made-construct, or a cyclic repeatable sequence; e.g. template, model, stencil, tessellation, Mandelbrot fractal.

An agile pattern is a simple, repeatable construct that provides a simple solution to a common problem encountered by agile organizations; e.g. Agile Frameworks: Scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean, DSDM, xDD, xUP, SAFe, etc; Agile Practices: pair programming, open space, etc.

Agile Patterns can work independently, or in tandem with other Agile Patterns, or as part of Agile Framework, that has many sets and subsets of Agile Patterns.

DONE.

What - What are the basic seven questions

While working with Scrum Teams I recommended limiting their idea proposals to the six common questions we learned in school:

Who,  What,  When,  Where,  Why,  How

Yet this approach seemed incomplete, inflexible, and limiting.   There always seemed to be a need for more details in some area.  Until one day I had an “aha moment”.   I uncovered the ‘Seventh Question’:

Which

DONE.

Start - Everything starts sometime

My name is Paul I. Pazderski.
This is the start of my new blog - Simpler Agile.
The two driving topics are - "Simpler" and "Agile" (yes ... I know).

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
(http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

Agile -- (computing) Of or relating to Agile software development, a technique for iterative and incremental development of software involving collaboration between teams. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agile)

DONE.