Emmanuel Levi-Valensi

• Your contact for everything startup

Startup guy @ Microsoft France

• Software• Support• Visibility• And more

Bizspark:

• Or blaisev@microsoft.com

@blaise_v

Blaise Vignon

• Consultancy & agile web and mobile development

Founder/GM People in Action

• Value driven• Innovation• User Experience• And more

Lean and agile practicioner:

• Or elv@pia-conseil.com

@PIA_Emmanuel

Failure and agility

A sad statistic

Source : Illusions of EntrepreneurshipScott Shane (US Data, all industries)

Proportion of New Businesses Founded in 1992 Still Alive By Year. Most startup failures are

due to running out of money before having the right product

There can be other causes (WCR, founder shoutfest, litigation)

But not in the context of this talk

The following slides were built with software engineering in mindSoftware engineering is• Highly creative• Very interdependant on coworkers• Loosely coupled

In short, it is like many other startup functions• Marketing• PR/Communication• Business Development• Product design

The learning from Software Engineering have been applied to broader fields

The longer the project, the likelier the failure

….because it is the less clear what success looks like …

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Project size (measured in function points, yes, we know…)

% o

f pro

ject

requ

irem

ent c

hang

es

… and noise levels can get out of control…

Undefined

Well defined

Requ

irem

ents

Technology(project environment in

general)

Mat

ure

Cutti

ng e

dge

Complicated

ComplexAnarchy

…but do we know why projects should be big?

Only 20% of features are used

often

… and designing the wrong thing is easy…

(we do not always know what the customer will look like)

Project (and startup) management can be like this

Inefficient way of working

The « break-down and specialize » management method leads to many wastes:

Stock of useless functionalities, documentation

High cost of coordination and communication

Agility proposes a different management paradigm…

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Source: http://agilemanifesto.org/

Important Agile Principles

Customer satisfaction is the main goal

Intrinsic quality

Measure to objectivize

Collective commitment

Agility proposes a different management paradigm…

Agile way of delivering The Scrum process

Fail fast, fail early

• As we are delivering fast, we can harvest positive and negative feedbacks

• As we accept changes, we can take into account these feedbacks and adapt our plans

• Feedback is more precious than perfection

Tips to accelerate failure (or success)

• Instead of building a full product or service, prototype it

• There are several prototype types:

Mechanical turk Pinocchio The Provincial The Minimal Viable Product

Agile Marketing

Validate market hypothesis

Imagine and validate the MVP Generate demand

Accelerate!

Some great books…

http://institut-agile.fr

Utilisation

Char

ge

Temps

Utilisation

Périoded’inactivité

“On / Off “ Ch

arge

Temps

“Unpredictible load“

Utilisation

Utilisation

Char

ge

Temps

“Fast growth“

Char

geTemps

Utilisation

“predictible load“

Use a cloud … it tracks your need

Use a cloud… it reduces waste

Use a cloud … focus on your own work

Traditonal hosting

Stockage

Serveurs

Réseau

O/S

Middleware

Virtualisation

Données

Applications

Runtime

Vou

s gére

z

Cloud IaaSInfrastructur

e

Storage

Servers

Networking

O/S

Middleware

Virtualization

Data

Applications

Runtime

Géré

par l’o

péra

teur

Clo

ud

Vou

s gére

z

Cloud PaaS

Plateform

Vou

s gére

z

Storage

Servers

Networking

O/S

Middleware

Virtualization

Applications

Runtime

Data

Géré

par l’o

péra

teur

Clo

ud

• Dans le cadre d’un cloud privé, l’opérateur de Cloud, c’est vous• La gestion des couches « grises » est souvent automatisée au maximum