One of the best aspects of the Agile Conference is the opportunity to sit down and chat with smart people from around the world that solve business problems every day. Monday was a perfect day to do this because the official start of the conference was not until Monday evening, and so I had plenty of time to meet people and share ideas and stories. I have had several opportunities to do just that, and two particular conversations stand out.

The first conversation was about a project where a group of statisticians were trying to perfect a model for determining loan defaults. The project had a couple of false starts and so a new project manager was brought in to help the team go in the right direction. He suggested that the team touch base twice daily for a real brief discussion of where the project was, and that this discussion incorporate everyone on the project, including the stakeholders.

The team incorporated this practice and soon identified a particular variable that was keeping their model from correctly determining loan defaults. The variable, Late Payment Percentage, indicated the percentage of the past 10 loan payments that were late. The team knew thought that this variable was key in determining whether a loan would default, but they were having trouble proving it conclusively. When the statisticians identified their problems in the team meeting, one of the stakeholders offered to discuss it with them after the meeting. As the stakeholder and statisticians talked through it, the stakeholder kept probing into why they thought the variable is so important. Through these discussions, he was able to help the statisticians realize that the overall percentage wasn’t as important as the trend data that was used to calculate it. A loan where the last three payments were late were more likely to default than a loan where the first three of the most recent payments were late (in other words, the last seven were on time).

The second conversation included a story about a project that was trying to create electronic medical records. The team working on the project pulled together a general practitioner and several specialists to understand how they used the information in the medical records. When the conversation came around to the physician’s notes, the team soon found out that while the doctors wrote down notes during an examination for their own information, they very rarely or ever looked at another doctor’s notes because they didn’t find them very useful. The project team had assumed that they would have to find some way to structure, index and catalog this data, but they realized through their discussions and in depth questioning of the physicians that they did not have to concern themselves with structuring the data as long as they were able to make them available to the physicians to read.

The moral of both of these stories is that in order to solve problems you need to make sure you are asking the right questions of the right people. As it turns out, you won’t get the opportunity to as the “right” people if you don’t include them on your project team. This is the power of the cross functional team. By pulling together people from different backgrounds with different skill sets you improve the likelihood that someone will identify the right questions to ask. Sometimes these right questions come from the least expected sources.

The way I came upon these stories is another example of that in action. I didn’t go into these conversations expecting to hear these stories, or garner a great deal of information to share in this blog, but I came upon them when the people I was talking to mentioned an interesting anecdote and I seized on the opportunity to inquire further. Agile methods stress collaboration and sharing information. Thankfully, the community eats its own dog food when it comes to the design of the conference. The sessions and the surrounding activities are all setup to allow a great deal of collaboration and story sharing to occur. The rest of my posts will more than likely be the result of those types of collaborations.