MVP Is the Key to Agile Project Management

MVP (acronym explained below) is a concept that can improveagile project management planning by ensuring that teams iterate intelligently.To unpack that sentence, let’s back up a little.

Agile project management emerged from the agilesoftware development model, which emphasizes iteration, testing,and incorporating feedback from that testing into the next iteration. Agile“sprints” quickly produce iterations of a software product. The approachfocuses on customer experience, collaborative development, and responsivenessto customer feedback.

Agile project management, according to Megan Torrance, chiefenergy officer at TorranceLearning, is “a way to manage the near-constantchange we face in our organizations … with an attitude that expects and acceptschange.” But to succeed, it’s not enough to iterate. Iterations have to work;they have to move the team—and product—to the end goal of an eLearning productthat enables learners to meet learning and performance goals.

Enter the MVP.

What’s an MVP? It’s a minimum viable product.Torrance describes the MVP as “the simplest thing that could possibly work.”

“The goal is to get a simple version of the solution outinto the hands of the users to make sure that you’re on the right track andidentify the highest-priority things to do next,” she said.

In essence, the MVP is the “first draft” of a product, andit has to meet the threshold of a successful iteration. A sketch or wireframeis not an iteration. According to Torrance, an iteration has to:

• Do real work,
• Be able to be evaluated, and
• Actually be evaluated…

For the iteration to be evaluated, someone has to use it—andprovide feedback. That feedback has to be gathered, studied, and, mostimportantly, used to improve the next iteration.

In short, the first iteration—the MVP—has to be a reasonablestand-in for the actual product under development.

Without the MVP, all is lost

“The MVP is the thing that actually makes an iterativedevelopment process—like agile, LLAMA, or SAM—work,” Torrance said.

That’s not an exaggeration. The idea behind an iterativeprocess is creating a “rough version of a product” with the express purpose ofgetting feedback on it. There are two enormous benefits, Torrance said:

• It’s easier to make changes to an early “draft”than to a finished product.
• Problems and needed changes are identified“before you’ve burned all your budget and timeline developing the ‘perfect’finished product.”

“Each cycle of an iterativedevelopment process is an opportunity to advance the product both iteratively(making it better) and incrementally (making it more). For an eLearningproduct, it could be things like fine-tuning scripts and graphics (iteratively)and moving from a script-and-screen draft to a playable online draft(incrementally),” Torrance said.

Defining the MVP

Before defining an MVP, the project team has to clearlydefine the learning objectives, which are related to the client’s or organization’sbusiness goals. A business goal solves a business problem. Training is not agoal; training is a means to an end—solving the business problem.

Torrance recommends starting by defining an observable goal.“What will I see a successful learner doing on the job after thecourse?” An observable goal uses an action verb, for example:

• The employee will enter data accurately(then define “accurately”)
• The employee will provide verbal feedbackto direct reports
• The employee will make sandwiches (or packorders or assemble widgets) according to the established process and tomeet defined standards

Next, the team has to define what the learners need to knowin order to meet the observable goal. That’s what the eLearning will teach them.

Agile project management, like agile software development,encourages working out loud, publicly, collaboratively. Torrance suggestsbreaking down goals into discrete tasks (see “The Secret of Better Project Management: Task Cards”), and creating task cards—orsticky notes, or lines on a whiteboard—where each task is defined. Tasks shouldbe small, and planners should keep constraints in mind: deadlines, budget,staff schedules—and scope.

Once the goals are clear, planning begins. Plan from big tosmall, Torrance advises, and work small to large: Define and create the MVPfirst.

Don’t skimp on user testing

“The biggest mistake I see people making is in not gettingtheir iterations out to actual users,” Torrance said. 

Developers often do testing with the client, with SMEs, orwith team members. But that’s not really going to tell them whether theeLearning will work with the people who actually need to use it.

Developing an advisory board or committee, or other group ofactual learners—people who might actually use the end product or who closelyreflect the abilities and knowledge level of the real learners—is one way to conductmeaningful user testing. Another is creating learner “personas”—archetypes or“learner stories” that capture the business needs and desired performanceoutcomes of the typical learner. (For more on personas, see “Personas Place Developer Focus on Learners’ Needs.”)

“Ideally, you should be testing your MVPs with the primarylearner persona(s) for your project or as close as you can get. So if you’rebuilding new-hire training, test an MVP on actual new hires, or people who arerecent new hires, or the immediate supervisors of new hires,” Torrance said.

For a project to train mentors and their protégés, Torrancesaid, “Our first iteration was a live ILT [instructor-led training] that wedelivered to members of the target audience. We then made adjustments to thatILT course, gave it to the client, then started working on the eLearningcourses. We used the ILT version of the course to validate the content and thejob aids for the program.”

So, yes, it takes time to do actual user testing, but thewhole point of iterative processes—like agile project management anddevelopment—is to be responsive to learners’ needs, so it is time well spent.“Perfect is in the eyes of the user, not the developer,” Torrance said. It’snot (only) about whether learners “like” the product or even whether they canpass tests based on the content; it’s about the learners’ performance aftercompleting the eLearning: “Specifically, we’d really like to know if the userscan perform the tasks successfully as a result of the training.”

Data gathered by testing the MVP and each successive iteration is usedto improve the next version. Project managers generally set the number ofiterations at the beginning of the management and development cycle; threeiterations is common.