Agile Analysis & Business Agility

Guest post by Angela Wick

In November of 2019 the State of Agile Analysis 2019 report was published and provides a deep look into the analysis activities and techniques that agile teams and organizations use and how they are contributing to agile success and business outcomes. Analysis can be seen as a hindrance to agility or an igniter of business agility. It all depends on how analysis is viewed by the organization and how the teams use analysis techniques to collaborate and to align the details to the outcomes and results. Great agile analysis helps teams and organizations prioritize and focus on the right work at the right time. 

Analysis can drive, track, and measure outcomes. Teams and organizations can get fast feedback continuously on how their work is delivering on real measurable outcomes not just delivering products fast. To get fast feedback and align it to the outcome measurements, teams need to chunk out the work into meaningful increments. This is what agile analysis is all about: Outcomes aligned to the small increments that get fast feedback.

When the right focus and techniques are used to align the strategy, vision, roadmap, and details of the user stories and delivery magic happens. Incremental outcomes through the use of customer aligned outcome metrics are aligned all the way through from the big picture to the details and the customer is at the center. Teams are showing great improvements on delivering outcomes, while leveraging analysis techniques and skills to provide the needed customer context to get real customer outcomes. Analysis helps teams prioritize, experiment and hypothesize all in alignment with customer relevancy, satisfaction, innovation leading to real outcomes. It's not just about fast product delivery where teams leaders guess if their solutions are going to make an impact. It’s about knowing the work all the way along is on track to provide the intended value.

Some key highlights from the research are:

• Success with user stories goes from 33% to 68% when teams use customer journey mapping and their stories are also feedback-able (fun stack) increments.
• Hypothesis and Experiments are the analysis techniques with a strongest relationship to results
• Teams using a product vision and customer aligned metrics are seeing more success with agile compared to teams that do not.

Analysis is related to agility! Your product ownership and business analysis functions can be transformed into business agility enablers!

You can download the full report at www.ba-squared.com/report