Some random thoughts on Agile, from an IA perspective.

Before jumping into this post, I'll say that I've now been involved in about seven projects that have attempted to employ an Agile development methodology. And I'll also say that most of them have not been successful. These were projects with different groups, at several different companies, with different goals and different user audiences. So, yes, I have watched Agile fail time after time, in many contexts, and that certainly colors my views on it as a way to approach product design and development. (Hint: It's probably just dandy for development, but it friggin' blows for design.)

Recently, I was asked a question: Are Agile and IA at all compatible?

My answer:
Agile and IA are not really compatible, no. But that shouldn't be surprising since Agile is a development methodology, not a design methodology. IA can be more compatible with Agile when you're talking about software or applications. But when dealing with web sites, particularly sites that are mostly about content or marketing, they don't really fit well together at all.

It can be made to work a little more easily when you're adding onto an existing product, but if you're starting from the ground up you can't necessarily just build tiny pieces of something and hope you'll be able to find a way to string them all together in a cohesive way later. You need some notion of what the greater picture is going to be, so you know what direction to shape things. That's typically what an IA needs to be concerned with, but Agile is fundamentally opposed to that.

For it to have a hope of working at all, IA has to get in front in the Agile method. IA has to start first. You can't fire the gun on your first sprint and expect IA or design to take off at the same time as dev. What ends up happening in that case is that the developers sit around waiting for IA and/or design to deliver something they can start working on.

Either you have to put IA (and design, to some extent) on its own track and start them well ahead of development, or you have to start your sprints with only IA activities and bring development on in later sprints. (Note: You can somewhat compensate for design lag by having a combo UI designer/developer, but finding a good one of those is *much* easier said than done. The same is not true for IA, because that's a much more "big picture" discipline.)

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