Default delivery process overview

Introduction

Good working practices are an essential foundation for enabling the rapid and reliable delivery of solutions that create a positive business and user impact. The practices described in this Default Delivery Process cover everything needed to take an idea through analysis, design, validation, elaboration, implementation, and finally into live operation, generating business benefit and providing feedback to steer future delivery.

To aid navigation we split this large topic into several sections. The activities described in each section are all continuous, concurrent and iterative, and everyone in the team is involved in all of them. Individual backlog items pass through these stages but do not form separate project phases.

What this is — and is not

This is a set of defaults for teams to use. It gives teams a quick way to establish effective processes, saving them time and helping them get productive quicker. But, these practices are not mandatory. Teams may choose to do things differently if they have good reason to do so, adopting these practices as needed for their situation.

And of course, teams may not have complete freedom to choose their delivery process. When this happens, this guide will help them propose improvements to their customer and explain the benefits.

These defaults will evolve over time and are not set in stone. If something looks wrong then please contribute suggestions.

Why?

We have always recognised the importance of autonomy for successful engagements, and that continues to be the case. But, we realise that this should not mean that every engagement has to start from scratch and build their ways of working afresh with nothing to work from. This guide gives them that starting point — not to follow slavishly, but so they don't have to reinvent things where it adds little value, instead letting them focus on more important things.

In our existing engagements, we see a lot of variety in how things are done. And to an extent, that is healthy: teams should be free to choose the right approach for the specific situation they and their client find themselves in. But we want to help teams make well-informed decisions, choosing bespoke solutions where it makes sense but sticking with established approaches that are known to work well as a default. We want to avoid the needless and wasteful variation which comes from repeatedly reinventing the wheel.

There will undoubtedly be cases where existing teams can streamline how they work to deliver faster and more reliably, and this guide is for them too. By comparing how they work with this set of agreed defaults, teams can look afresh at their practices and consider how what is described here can be used to strengthen their technical delivery processes.