Our first application of Agile principles to the research process, which occurred during our study of thought leadership in the tech industry, was a very Agile-esque journey into the unknown. We learned a great deal that applies to future applications of Agile Research Development, so here's my retrospective.

You Can Be Agile Up To The Boundaries Of What You Control
Ultimately, you control only part of the value stream. This maxim holds true wherever you apply Agile, and software developers learn this principle right away. You can be the most disciplined developer imaginable, never checking in code that doesn't work, always building in tests, and still be at the mercy of your own QA team. And even if the larger team, including testers, works in blissful harmony, someone needs to deploy the code on a live system. (Which is why dev ops is receiving a lot of attention from within the Agile community these days. See Jez Humble's recent book for a good example.)

If a stream is an appropriate metaphor for value creation and delivery, then this stream always takes many twists and turns, frequently encountering dams and obstructions. The success of Agile, therefore, depends to a great extent on eliminating these kinks, navigating around them, or learning to accept them as part of the value stream's trajectory. 

A few quick observations on what we've seen at Agile 2010 this week:

Today was our first official update to the research plan (a.k.a. the development document) for our project investigating thought leadership in the technology industry. A quick refresher: this particular piece of research is our first venture into Agile research development, which (1) applies Agile principles to our research, and (2) opens the project to the community to participate in the research process from start to finish. In other words, we're using the newly-launched Forrester Community as the forum where the voice of the customer will speak directly to us about our research as we're doing it.

You can see the current development document, including the updated text and the comments that inspired those changes, here. As promised, we're also maintaining a change log for tracking these changes over time. (The development document is also versioned, so we can look back on the history of edits through that mechanism, too.)

Today's a very exciting day for me. As you know, I'm a member of a team of Forrester analysts who write research specifically for product marketers and product managers in the tech industry. A few weeks ago, we launched a community for product marketers and product managers. Now, we're bringing those two activities together by including our PM community in every stage of a research project. Plus, we're using an Agile approach. And you're all invited.

(Role-based research. The voice of the customer, expressed loudly and regularly through social media. Agile as the vehicle for applying what customers say to the product we're developing, in the most rapid and substantive way possible. I guess we do read our own research.)

What's The Topic?
We've yet to meet a product marketer or product manager who isn't interested in thought leadership, given its attractiveness and elusiveness. Gaining recognition as a thought leader is only the first step. Having achieved that exalted status, how do vendors convert thought leadership into tangible business benefits?

For our first venture into this new research approach, thought leadership was an easy choice of topic: important, popular, practical, and manageable.

Where Does The Community Fit In?
The community has a bigger role to play in this project than just suggesting a topic. We need your suggestions and feedback throughout the entire research process, from inception to publication. For example, before doing the primary research, we'll draft a list of interview questions. Since thought leadership has no end of interesting aspects, we want to make sure that the questions we ask go straight to the issues that matter most to product marketers and product managers. Here are but a few examples: