PegaWORLD Day 3: Agile Projects Highlighted

This year's agenda was dominated by presentations from and about JPMorganChase. Leaders from various business segments and functional specialties with the mega-bank were showcasing aspects of their PRPC implementation efforts of the past year. The results of their internal efforts—and Pega's concerted efforts to enable those internal efforts— are impressive. One of the key presentations highlighting success at the bank was delivered by Paul Kompare. Paul walked an audience of 50 through his experiences with agile project techniques supported by the new Direct Capture of Objectives (DCO) tools.

The project arc basically followed my usual pattern for BPM agility in three broad steps:

Automation	Flows	UI	Integration
Stupid	Simple	Ugly	Isolated
Stupid	Subtle	Ugly	Isolated
Smart	Subtle	Pretty	Connected

Here is how Paul described each of the three, monthly-long, project iterations that they completed.

• Happy Path Flows – Development of DCO Use Cases and subsequent implementation of the 'normal' course of a business process. These flows are usually the simplest, least controversial, and most heavily utilized process paths. Review with end-users and incorporate feedback.
  
• Addition of Exception and Secondary Flows – Development of additional DCO use cases and implementation of process paths that fail to satisfy some criteria for normal, expedited processing which often requires more complex manual interventions. Review with end-users and incorporate feedback.
  
• UI Improvements, Interfaces, and Reports – These refinements of existing flows to improve user experience, inject and generate live data, and provide task and transaction-level reporting is a follow-on activity.
  

The team reported that they were able to do far more with far less time using this approach. They were particularly impressed with the ability to cut out their typical lengthy requirements documentation phase which trafficked in varied MSWord templates ranging from 150 to 400 pages each. The requirements, he commented, were never quite right at the start of development and the business was punished for that through change orders. The iterative approach, on the other hand, allowed for reasonable degree of malleability through the process.

I was encouraged that Pega was taking pains to showcase successes for iterative project executions. We have certainly come to view iterative development as an internal competency and mainstream direction. The crowd at this conference session was enthusiastic about the result and curious about the ways that JPMC got started on this agile path. In the coming year, we should take care to reinforce our commitment to iterative approaches, embrace DCO in our processes, and evangelize the benefits to our sometimes nervous customers.