Nature, Impact and Value of Change
In this article, I’m sharing lessons and learning about change. How understanding the nature, impact and value of change resulted in more clarity and confidence and helped me to prepare a release plan.
Situation 🤺
Like my other colleagues, I also have been part of such Taskforce a couple of times. But recently in my task force, it was becoming very hard to come up with a proper release plan. We’re struggling to make a release plan which can be delivered incrementally and iteratively.
Background 📜
What is a Taskforce? 🤔
At layer, we form a triplet of Tech, Product and Business to refine features. Mostly one person from each area. Sometimes Product owner represents business expertise or acts as a proxy for business. For each epic people rotates from each area. This helps to create opportunities to learn, grow and avoid biases in the company. We called such a triplet Taskforce.
The task force has the following responsibility 💪
- Refine feature aka epic
- Be a point of contact for all the QA during crunch time.
- Prepare release plan
Still, the picture was not very clear in 🧠
We had a few brainstorming meetings but still picture was not very clear in our head; so I decided to analyse this epic critically and come up with some options.
What we did 🤞
I decided to start from a clean slate and look at this feature from the user’s point of view. To do that I asked the following question for each concept and change that we wanted to bring in.
- What problem does it solves for the user?
- What problem it might create for the user?
- What is the nature of these changes?
- Breaking change - if it breaks or changes existing concept/feature drastically and changes affects user flow.
- New change - there were no such concepts that existed before in the system and it may or may not affect user flow.
- Enhancement - changes refine existing concepts but not so drastically and may not affect user flow.
After doing this analysis and spending a few hours, I realized more than 70 % of changes were either enhancement or new changes and ~ 30 % were breaking changes. Just doing analysis unblocked a very big chunk of features and it brings a ton of clarity to my head.
For breaking changes, I did one extra step I asked the same 3 questions for an existing feature to gain more clarity. After that, I knew exactly what we were taking out and giving back to the user. Now it was very easy to spot and fill the gaps.
In summary, nature, impact and value of incoming changes is very useful in overall shaping up.