From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Last responsible moment

From the course: Agile Requirements Foundations

Last responsible moment

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- As Business Analysts, we help the product owner and business stakeholders make decisions, and the agile mindset, encourages us to make these decisions at the last responsible moment. Agile BA's believe that the later a decision can be made, the more flexibility there is for change. This allows teams to take advantage of opportunities while minimizing the cost of delay. We can't take this phrase too literally though, it's not an excuse to avoid decisions but rather, helps teams remember that not all decisions need to be made early. What happens if conditions change or learning's reveal better options? Early decisions might box teams into paths that are hard to reverse. The last responsible moment concept, applies to requirements in many ways. First, defining everything in detail upfront as prescribed by more predictive and traditional approaches, can get in the way of speedy high-value delivery. If requirements are defined early and in bulk, than responding to change becomes much more laborious. There are so many requirements to assess when changes happen which dramatically degrades the team's efficiency. Next, last responsible moment, is knowing when more information will and is likely to come. It's responsible to hold off decision making until we have more information, or until the cost of waiting outweighs the cost of moving forward. Many of us actually do this naturally in our personal lives so why not with requirements as well? Things that team's may wait for to make decisions would include, customer feedback on the last release that's expected to impact the designs of the next backlog items, or things like, strategic leadership decisions expected to impact priorities for the next release. Agile avoids doing work just in case and focuses on doing work just in time, but this can be hard for some of us to embrace. Much of that resistance is about fear, fear that if we wait we might miss a deadline or something bad will happen. Well, if we wait, we will likely have better information to go off of that will deliver even better value to our customers and make a better product than the competition. Here's the challenging part of this concept. We never really know when the last responsible moment is, but if you're in tune with the team and the business context, you tend to know instinctively when it's coming. For example, you know from experience that it takes you about two weeks to refine a user story so it meets the definition of ready for the team. You also know there are a lot of things in play that may change the priorities and make that story not a priority for the next few iterations. The last responsible moment would indicate that you wait until two weeks before the planned iteration for a story to start working on refining it to ready. The bottom line is that it's a judgment call and a trade-off between doing something now and doing something later. If I do it now, and things change, we may miss out on an opportunity and have rework. If I wait until later, I may have a lot of pressure and deadlines. Realizing that you can delay decisions and details and thinking through when the last responsible moment is of a situation, is a skill to practice. The best way to make the right judgment call is to pay attention to your surroundings both internal and external so you see the change coming. The results are better adaptability and a better product.

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