How to make sure your work is 100% road-ready

If everyone in your team knows what they need to do to deliver work that is road-ready, you’ll get more done, month after month. That’s where Scrum’s Definition of Done comes in. 

Even if you’re not working in Scrum, keeping a clear focus on releasable quality will give you an edge.

Your work is road-ready if you could release or test it today. That means:

• it’s the quality your customers expect
• it works perfectly with the rest of your product.

Getting work to this state saves lots of time. You avoid costly rework created by bugs and bits of the product that don’t play well together. These often trip you up down the line when the work is no longer top of mind, making the fixes slow and painful.

It also means you deliver value fast. If you release the work, your customers get the benefits immediately. If you user test it, you get value from what you learn about any improvements needed. And your customers get this value as soon as you implement the improvements.

We're obviously not alone in seeing the importance of getting this right. Our post on the Definition of Done is one of our most popular. It details what makes an effective DoD, gives examples and explains how to create and maintain a DoD as a team.

Understanding the cloud in 2020: report and case study

The Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report surveyed 750 cloud decision-makers from around the world to understand their experiences, challenges and plans. 

For the fourth year in a row, top of the to-do list of most organisations was optimising existing use in order to cut costs. This was followed by cloud migration.

DigitalNZ recently tackled both of these. If you're after real-world insights into running a cloud migration and cutting costs once you're in the cloud, check out this case study:

An Agile approach to cloud migration — case study

As COVID-19 broke, a late question was added to the survey. Of the respondents who answered this question, 59% expect cloud use to exceed plans due to the pandemic.

You can read the full report here:

Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report (PDF)

Remote Agile training update

Planning for our remote Agile training continues. 

Our Agile Lead Rebecca just completed an exclusive ICAgile course on Facilitating Exceptional Remote Learning. She found it really valuable and reckons we’ll be able to make our training even better than it was.

If you’re interested in remote Agile training, contact us today.

Let us know if you’re after the remote equivalent of our free 2-hour Introduction or our paid 2-day Agile Professional Foundation.

Restarting projects to deliver real value

Now New Zealand has moved to alert level 2, we envisage that a number of projects will come off the backburner.

If you have a project that’s back on the radar, check out whether you’re eligible for our free discovery workshops. These workshops let you co-design your product with your key stakeholders. By getting everyone in agreement on the project's objectives, and the benefits it will bring your customers, you maximise the value it will deliver.