The development process part 3!

Dear reader,

In the first 2 post on the development process I have written about the business process and project execution model. But before I talk about the feedback loop process which is the 3rd part of a successful product development process, I just want to also finalize with some comments on the 3rd part of the project execution model the maintenance phase. Basically the maintenance phase is more or less a copy of the before execution phase and the execution phase but often in a much less or strict form. It can often be run with only two light wight business decision and using Scrum as execution model on the existing product backlog.

Okay now back to the feedback loop process. It is part of a very important part of the so called learning organization. As I stared of with in my first post I have yet to see any organization that know 100% what they are doing and a common mistake is that most organization does not learn from the mistakes or even from the good things they do. Or as George Bernard Shaw put it in one of my favorite quotes: “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history”.
Also since many organizations often are on the level 1 of the CMMI-model they trust heroes in there organization to fix the big issues and come through in the end, however sometimes these heroes leave your company and then you need a process that anyone can use and repeat the success of the last time and a process that is world class. Therefore you need a working feedback loop process.

So, how do you setup a working feedback loop process. First to be able feedback things back to something you need process and other frameworks in place to start with. The process and frameworks you need are the following:

• Process for all part of the company: Sales & Marketing, development, support, operations etc…


• Product development checklists for product managers, project managers and developers to have as support tools when developing new products.


• Written down clear roles and responsibilities

Now if you have the above, very good! You can now start using a controlled feedback loop process and become a learning organization (if not you have some work todo :- ). So how does the feedback loop work. You should introduce in your product development checklists that the project should have lessons learned sessions on a regular basis and also use the part in Scrum that is used after every sprint that is called a Sprint retrospective. These two tools and on the softer side work on a company culture that want to improve productivity hence feedback improvements continuously.

The trick then is to get your employees to feedback lessons learned sessions and sprint retrospective feedback to you or any manager within the company that might need to have the feedback and in 95% of all cases you as manager can feedback this data into any of the above 3 things (i.e. checklists, roles and responsibilities or your process). And voila, you have feedback loop process and have become a learning organization. Sounds easy? Yes but it is not so easy in reality, there are many pot holes you might fall into. For example do not implement a huge database where you store all lesson learned and hope that people would be able to ready it all…It will not work you will be overwhelmed with data. Keep it simple and try to feedback and upgrade process, checklist and roles and responsibilities on a regule basis so these documents become living document, then you also have a much bigger chance that you will get your employees to read them more often.

Have a nice weekend!

Anders