Agile and Beyond 2016

So often we start our projects with a problem and a solution already in mind, usually handed to us by either management or a product owner. Equally as often during the project we find ourselves discovering that the problem handed down was not the problem to solve at all, but something else entirely. We’ll start to call this phenomenon scope creep and do all we can to either stop the change or start making huge trade offs to accommodate the change. This session takes us back a step in the process and proposes a better way to help our customers explore and define the problem before we start building the solution. Using the Design Thinking approach from the Stanford School of Design (http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/#gear-up) we will show how this can be used to work with our customers to clearly define the problem space and generate an approach to solve the problem. The Design Thinking approach embodies many of the agile tenets such as customer involvement, collaborative approach, learning from feedback, and an incremental approach to building. Using the 5 steps of Design Thinking; Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, this interactive session will present the concepts and attendees will practice by applying the methods at their tables.