After having read „Getting Things Done“ (GTD) by David Allen, I realized that one can merge the ideas of GTD and agile software development processes. In GTD David Allan proposes to have several goal level. The vision of life leads to long term goals, which leads to projects, and weekly goals and so forth. I’ve tried to match this idea to a process like Scrum. Starting from the bottom:
- During the daily scrum meeting the team defines a daily goal. This goal is influenced by the goal of the sprint.
- In the sprint planning the team fixes the goal of the iteration. If the iteration length is a week, it can be compared to the weekly planning in GTD.
- The project goal is formed by the product owner. The goal is not well defined, it’s more a vision that is refined during the iterations.
- So – what’s the next level. It’s the strategic level. It’s defined by the business vision and influences the IT strategy and activities in enterprise architecture.
If we introduce an agile process, we should address all goal levels. I think it falls to short, if the agile process is introduced only up to the project level. But how does the strategic level influence the project level? Do we need a stratigic backlog, like a product backlog?