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Planning ahead is notoriously difficult, and the most careful plans may not succeed in light of changing contexts and user needs. Yet in many EU Research and Innovation projects, the norm is still to plan ahead as much as possible using clearly defined milestones and deliverables dates in Gantt charts for example, leaving little room to adapt plans ‘en route’. To improve our capacity to be responsive to change, the INTERLACE consortium agreed early on to experiment working with an agile workflow. Agile project management rests on a set of core values and principles, that favours an iterative rather than a forward-looking approach to deliverable development. By improving its agility and embracing changing requirements, the INTERLACE project aims to develop more user-oriented deliverables. The purpose of this guidance document is to provide theoretical and practical guidance on achieving an agile transformation in a Research and Innovation project such as INTERLACE. The guidance document gives an introduction on the key values and principles of working agile, followed by an explanation of the key components of the agile framework used in the INTERLACE project. The guidance explains in a comprehensive step-by-step manner how to get started, and provides a practical toolkit with more hands-on tips and examples. Key lessons learned during the implementation of the INTERLACE agile framework have also been summarised to help guide other projects that may want to apply an agile workflow. These include for example the need: 1) to invest sufficient time to foster a transition towards an agile mindset and avoid ‘fake agile’ frameworks, 2) for the co-creation of an agile framework adapted to a Research and Innovation project with the development teams and Work Packages, including a clear role for the project coordinator, 3) to foster engagement, as teams rely on digital interfaces to communicate with very little opportunities for regular physical interactions, 4) to invite, coordinate and engage a sufficiently large pool of potential end-users in product development (the INTERLACE Impact Task Force). |
