Which Practices Should I Adopt First?


Which Practices Should I Adopt First?<title/>

Introducing a practice is an investment.


The reason for introducing a best practice into your organization is to obtain business benefits measured in improved project results. Introducing a practice is an investment. As with all investments, you need to make a business case with a return, such as, higher-quality, lower cost, and/or shorter time to market.

To determine which practice(s) to adopt first, create a shortlist of problems to fix.


You can choose many different starting points for adopting best practices, and most of them will provide you with value (see Figure 8.1). But are some better than others? To determine which practice(s) to adopt first, you need to create a shortlist of problems that you need to fix. This can be done using either of the following two approaches. The first approach is to walk through the problem statement for each practice and see which problems resonate with you. Do you experience the problem described? If you do, put the problem and the related practice on the shortlist.

Figure 8.1. There Are Many Roads Leading to Good Results.

Most practices will provide you with benefits, but some will have higher pay-offs than others. You need to decide what your end goal is and then determine the best way to get there.


The other approach is to consider the issues your team has faced in the past and assess their impact on your business. If the impact is big, write the problem down. This book contains many practices, so to help you to find the practices that fix problems in a certain area, we have organized them around key principles. If you are trying to find a cure for a specific problem you are experiencing, review the principles to see which one(s) are the most relevant. Then go through the practices for the relevant principle(s) and put them on your shortlist.

Once you have a shortlist of relevant problems and related practices for your project or organization, the next step is to identify the value of fixing them. If it is hard to attach real numbers to the value of fixing individual problems, articulate their relative value. After a while, you should have a prioritized list of practices to adopt.

But what if you are doing fine, but there is a drive to "do better"? You can use the same approach as described above to identify the practices to adopt first, but with a more positive spin. Rather than looking for problems, you are looking for opportunities for improvements.

Will you ever be "done" adopting practices? We will answer that question in the next section.



Agility and Discipline Made Easy(c) Practices from OpenUP and RUP
Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP
ISBN: 0321321308
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 98

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