Agile for designers: case study of a process

How I used No Handoff to integrate discovery and production teams in an Agile project.

Background

We are all familiar with project handoff: that universally hated period of inefficiency, disruption, and blame. Your precious work gets thrown over the fence, or you catch something that doesn't make sense and have to do it anyway.

Agile disrupted the handoff between developers, leadership, and with the end user, but the handoff between designers and developers is still going strong. At it’s core, Agile promotes more empowered teams, delivering working software in shorter iterative cycles. But the discovery processes (UX, design) don’t yet have a home in that pattern.

No Handoff is an Agile working pattern I have stumbled upon through trial and error, to ease the friction between design and development.

This case study illustrates an ongoing project where we are using this working pattern to bring discovery into the Agile tent and deliver working software together.

(Looking for an Agile primer first? There are lots of resources.)

Project Description

We needed to replace the multiple legacy tools and hacks used by a Customer Support team with a single interface where they can accomplish all of their tasks. We wanted to disrupt our usual project process of discovery and design on one side, and development on the other. Instead we want to involve all roles in the process of delivering incremental working software, and avoid a handoff stage.

Getting started with Discovery

Often in Agile discovery is assumed. For this project, we did not yet know the scope or specs so we started the entire team at the very beginning with user research. I often use UX as a verb: an activity undertaken by the UX role of course, but also by dev, management, and end users. User needs is the glue that binds us all together, and discovering them is a shared responsibility.

Our development team follows a standard two week sprint cadence. For the duration of the project, UX and design will adopt that pattern too. Over a series of…