10 Evolutionary Project Management (Evo) principles

This is an overview of 10 Evo process principles originally intended for participants of the Tom and Kai Gilb February 2002 training sessions with a US customer.

The intent is to allow our participants to get their mind in gear for the courses. For simplicity’s sake one page per principle will explain and exemplify the principle in detail. It may be used freely with credit to Tom and Kai.

Evo Principles SUMMARY:

1. Real results, of value to real stakeholders, will be delivered early and frequently.
2. The next Evo delivery step must be the one that delivers the most stakeholder value possible at that time.
3. Evo steps deliver the specified requirements, evolutionarily.
4. We cannot know all the right requirements in advance, but we can discover them more quickly by attempts to deliver real value to real stakeholders.
5. Evo is holistic systems engineering - all necessary aspects of the system must be complete and correct - and delivered to a real stakeholder environment - it is not only about programming - it is about customer satisfaction.
6. Evo projects will require an open architecture - because we are going to change project ideas as often as we need to, in order to really deliver value to our stakeholders.
7. The Evo project team will focus their energy, as a team, towards success in the current Evo step. They will succeed or fail in the current step, together. They will not waste energy on downstream steps until they have mastered current steps successfully.
8. Evo is about learning from hard experience, as fast as we can - what really works, and what really delivers value. Evo is a discipline to make us confront our problems early - but which allows us to progress quickly when we really provably have got it right.
9. Evo leads to early, and on-time, product delivery - both because of selected early priority delivery, and because we learn to get things right early.
10. Evo should allow us to prove out new work processes, and get rid of bad ones early.