10 Evolutionary Project Management (Evo) Principles
I really like the 10 principles that Tom and Kai Gilb have put together for the Evo process. Evo is an Agile Evolutionary Project Management & Product Development method.
Summary of the 10 Principles:
- Real results, of value to real stakeholders, will be delivered early and frequently.
- The next Evo delivery step must be the one that delivers the most stakeholder value possible at that time.
- Evo steps deliver the specified requirements, evolutionarily.
- We cannot know all the right requirements in advance, but we can discover them more quickly by attempts to deliver real value to real stakeholders.
- Evo is holistic systems engineering – all necessary aspects of the system must be complete and correct – and delivered to a real stakeholder environment – it is not only about programming – it is about customer satisfaction.
- Evo projects will require an open architecture – because we are going to change project ideas as often as we need to, in order to really deliver value to our stakeholders.
- The Evo project team will focus their energy, as a team, towards success in the current Evo step. They will succeed or fail in the current step, together. They will not waste energy on downstream steps until they have mastered current steps successfully.
- Evo is about learning from hard experience, as fast as we can – what really works, and what really delivers value. Evo is a discipline to make us confront our problems early – but which allows us to progress quickly when we really provably have got it right.
- Evo leads to early, and on-time, product delivery – both because of selected early priority delivery, and because we learn to get things right early.
- Evo should allow us to prove out new work processes, and get rid of bad ones early.