The “Iterative Inception” – Some more thoughts

In a recent workshop on inceptions I was reminded of a few things and it highlighted to me a couple of risks associated with doing an inception over an extended period of time.

•  It’s easy to forget stuff.
• It’s easy to assume that because you know something, everyone else in the team does too.

The session was a timely reminder for me of the goals and outputs we should be expecting from a well run inception. I still believe that there is a right context for running the inception for a project as series of smaller workshops. We don’t have to take a large group of people out of their jobs for a significant period of time, and it allows us to target the sessions with just the right people present. However, we do have to work a bit harder at sharing the output from those sessions, and we have to be extra diligent in making sure that we have covered everything and that we are able to go back over important or risky aspects of the project as many times as it takes to get things right.

It’s easy to remember to work on project scope. Right from day one people are thinking about functionality and a set of epics or stories. It’s harder to remember to keep your project context up to date (Why are we doing this? What is the problem we are trying to solve?). It is also easy to forget things like Non Functional Requirements, Test Plans, Communication Planning, Domain Modeling and Roles & Goals.

I think the important take home is that no matter whether you are incepting in a two week “Event” or doing it as a series of smaller sessions the important thing is to plan, use your checklist of things to cover, and be diligent about doing them. Don’t just “Start” your project until you can demonstrate readiness.