Musings on project management: Swimming with Agile and the WBS

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Swimming with Agile and the WBS

WBS? Agile? Swim lane?
Do all these belong in the same paragraph?

The WBS can still have a valuable place in the agile project, but at a higher level -- less detail -- and certainly ties product development to other swim lanes or work streams in the project, and certainly the WBS applies to other than development that is going along with agile.

Some caution: "swim lane" and "work stream" have the image of relatively few points of contact and interface -- at the beginning, at the end. In an agile project, there are many scheduled points of contact with these other streaming activities, not least at every release review.

Ooops! You don't know what a swim lane is? We read at Modern Analyst.com that a swim lane is a process diagram with this feature:

... swim lanes communicate additional information about who performs the activity or when it takes place. [Consequently] it’s typically a preferred best practice to include them.