The Star Wars Approach To Business Agility

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Let's take a look at what we can learn about business strategy through the medium of Star Wars. I can at least promise that it's not nothing. Work in small increments There's a lot we could learn from the Empire's failed attempt at building a planet-destroying laser space station, known as the Death Star. There are few projects that suffer from slowpoke business strategies more than infrastructure projects, and this is possibly the biggest infrastructure project ever imagined. If you're building a space station the size of a small moon, you have a lot of teams butting heads, I can tell you. That's why the agile process could have come in handy, if Emperor Palpatine had got his head around the startup mentality. The agile process is completely different from the traditional or waterfall process for developing projects or software, not just slightly different. Working in smaller increments is a big part of the agile process, and it can take some time to adjust to, especially if you've been doing traditional business analysis for some time. For instance, don't peg all your success on completing your moon-sized battle station without putting some smaller, more achievable goals in place along the way. Why not set out some realistic time-based goals and have several teams working towards those over allotted periods? After all, some more agile organization might just come and make your enormous costly prestige project somewhat... redundant. Hold agile meetings, with no strangling In many businesses, meetings are a source of serious wheel-spin. They start late, run long, don't achieve much in between and have poor follow-up. The Galactic Empire holds some of the worst meetings we've ever seen. They're full of people failing to listen to each others opinions, butting heads and failing to use time effectively. Also, one guy gets strangled using the power of the force. Extremely non-agile. Make sure to time-box the meeting overall (for example, set a time limit of 45 minutes), individual agenda items and especially presentations. Get people used to the fact that you will guillotine anything which runs over -- be ruthless, but you know -- not force-strangling ruthless. Frame the purpose of the meeting as a question: for instance, "how do we best ...?" -- don't just waltz into a room and declare that you've disbanded the Galactic Senate. Deftly-facilitated individual meetings and a well-designed portfolio of recurring meetings are essential. Their absence means every hot-potato issue which comes up has to be handled through ad-hoc meetings, which is what typically tips most organizations into meetings overload in the first place. The key is little and often -- but most importantly, regular. Ask the tough questions early Sometimes it's not easy to ask the tough questions. For instance: How much experience does your team have? Have you ever built a project of this kind before? Do you foresee any problems with employing two analysts and over thirty developers?