How We Sliced the Elephant

The key to minimizing risk in large projects is to find a way to “slice the elephant,” that is, find a way to release the system in small increments instead of saving up for a big-bang release at the end. Ideally, each increment should independently add value to the users and knowledge to the teams.

We sliced this elephant across two dimensions: geographic location and type of crime.

images/About-the-project/Slice-the-elephant.png
  • Release 1.0-1.2: Pilot releases to only one region—Östergötland—supporting only a small number of common crime types such as drunk driving and weapon possession. Other crime types were handled the old manual way. For each subsequent ...

Get Lean from the Trenches now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.