Suggested Artefacts
The other main artefacts in PL are the:
- Test plan: this is contained in the Backlog and defines the code level acceptance criteria
- Communications plan: defines the team composition and the stakeholder map. Used to communicate important information.
- Impediments log: similar in purpose to the Risk log.
- Vision: the source of the enterprise's values and goals against which the individual project is aligned.
Other things are possible, just make sure you need them and they add real value to the project being delivered. They should not be written as part of a audit trail exercise to show innocense in the face of the project ultimately failing (know as 'covering your a*se'). That would not be a good expenditure of energy.
Agile projects do not have the notion of stages per se. PrinceLite takes the view that there are situations where phases are useful. As a purist you may be resistant to the notion of phases, but the wider business likes them. What to do? Imagine a phase has a milestone and at that milestone you need to demonstrate the team has reached a certain 'velocity', otherwise the process is without points at which it can be objectively assessed and could run for longer than really it should.
Table: A suggested set of artefacts.
| Name | Phase | Owner | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blueprint | Strategic | Senior management team | Define vision. Define the 'to be' organisation. No timescale constraints. The transformed enterprise 'wish list'. Used to evaluate project proposals. |
| Programme plan | Strategic | Programme manager | A summary of proposed projects and 'in-flight' projects. A summary of project state. Includes benefit realisation. Used to report progress to senior management. |
| Artefact plan | Contemplation | Project Sponsor | State what collection of the candidate artefacts are going to be used in this project under consideration. |
| Mandate | Contemplation | Project Sponsor | A short description of the proposed project before any funding is allocated. If accepted results in 'seed funding'. Seed funding used to produce the PID. |
| Project Initiation document (PID) | Inception | Project Sponsor | Defines project scope and high level requirements. Used to secure funding. Measured against the blueprint. |
| Backlog/Business requirements specification | Elaboration | Scrum master | Produced when project is agreed (funded). Includes an elaboration of the high level requirements from the PID. Contains mid-level requirements. Used to validate decision to fund. May be used to inform a prototype. When accepted project moves into elaboration phase. |
Solution design specification (optional) |
Strategic | Architect, Designer, CIO | Defines a physical system to be built by programmers based on the organisations architecture and an implementation model. |
| Sprint plan | Elaboration et al | Scrum master | Inform work |
| Communications plan | Inception | Scrum master | Define who will get what communications concerning which issues. Although the SRO may own an artefact, they do not necessarily own the entire process of artefact evaluation. The communication plan defines who is 'in the loop' and the nature of each 'loop'. |