 Hi everyone, it's Monica Wachee here, teaching you how to combine your health analytics background with data science concepts. Today, we are going to be reviewing the different ways application development teams are configured. Increasingly, health data analysts are being asked to analyze data originating in applications. That's why I developed this online course called Application Basics. It's to teach the basics of applications to professionals in the health data space so they can better understand the data that come from applications. And in this video, I'm going to focus on the different configurations of application development teams because that impacts how the applications they build turn out. And you'll see how in this video. Remember how matrix management used to be the way application development teams were put together using the traditional method? Here is an example of a team. We have Carol, who is a backend programmer and we have Nock, who is a network engineer. We also have Tyrone, who is a front end developer and Amanda, who is a physician serving as a subject matter expert on the Medical Records Project. And we have Fatima, who is a user interface user experience specialist. Back in the days of traditional application development, we had our sponsor at the top and that sponsor would communicate pretty often with the project manager. The sponsor and the project manager needed to have a shared vision of the project. Then the PM would translate that vision for the rest of the people on the team. Basically, the PM would scurry around trying to get the team members to produce deliverables and to meet project milestones. This was not really ideal when I look back at it. Basically, all the techies at the bottom of the slide would congeal into sort of a click. They would kind of make fun of the PM and the sponsor, mainly because they would ask for ridiculous things that were not technologically possible. I remember one experienced PM telling me a sponsor asked her if we made a picture on a piece of paper and put it under a computer with the computer just automatically make a webpage based on what was written on the paper. He seriously asked her that. So while this diagram looks theoretically okay, in practice, it resulted in a lot of disconnection within the team. This is part of what caused the traditional development approach to take so long. But that issue with internal team disconnection wasn't the only thing that dragged out the development timeline. Another problem with matrix management is that there were always these issues in the background that would haunt us. First, most of us were on other projects. We couldn't just focus on one project at the time. Sometimes even PMs would be placed on multiple projects. I remember back in those traditional development days, PMs would get paid a lot of money, but they would work like 80 hours a week. When I think back in my mind to the ones I knew back then, I always see them in my mind's eye with sweat pouring off of their faces and arms. It was really crunch time for PMs back then. But PMs weren't the only ones distracted. Team members were distracted because none of us actually reported to the PM. In fact, no one reported to the PM. We all had bosses out there somewhere who were not on the gantt to whom we reported. And they also required things of us that were not part of established projects. So basically not only did we have all this disconnection, we had all this distraction. Distraction led to confusion, led to dysfunction, and all that led to added time and expense we needed to allocate to the project. Now let's talk about agile teams. You will notice that the same people are involved in the agile configuration. We still have the sponsor telling the PM what to do and we still have all of the team members dealing with the PM. But notice how the PM is kind of in the middle now. PMs are not these exalted high level people anymore. In fact, they seem to have a lot less power. Notice that the arrows now go back and forth between the PM and the team members. This means that there is more crosstalk between the PM and the team members. And the PM doesn't have the top down power over team members she once had. Agile teams usually start the day with a meeting called the scrum meeting. These meetings do not have agendas. Instead, the PM and other team members tend to keep track of action items and other tasks using software that supports the agile methodology. So what I've seen is that they generally spend the scrum meeting going over entries in the software applications and planning what everyone is going to do that day. Scrum meetings remind me of those cooking shows where the kitchen team meets at the beginning and gets ready to cook a meal for a hundred people at a wedding or something. They tend to be hectic and quick and run at a chaotic pace. In fact, the whole day seems to run that way under agile. Agile methodology allows the sponsor to be more involved in the day-to-day development of the app. That way, the whole project can pivot relatively quickly. Think of the different technological earthquakes we've had over the last few years. Hacks, ransomware, electronic terrorism, even new laws banning or promoting certain software. The agile methodology and these daily scrum meetings make it possible to pivot a whole application team on a dime if needed. I have found that when I get data from applications that were developed using the agile approach, they tend to be a hot mess. I attribute that to a missing design step. You won't see much effort devoted to design in the agile approach. So you are probably wondering in this day and age, how do you do application development in healthcare properly? Well, to answer that question, I first recommend you take my applications basics course. In the course, I give an example of a rapid application development or RAD approach that I prefer. And if you wanna take your health data analysis career to an even more data science direction, consider joining my data science online group mentoring program. This applications basics course is part of the foundational curriculum for that program. Have you ever served on an agile development team and participated in scrum meetings? Or have you been in a matrix management scenario and have stories to tell? Please add your comments about your experiences. And thanks for watching. If you like this video, please hit the like button. And also please enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you for watching this video, which is part of the Public Health to Data Science rebrand program. If you are interested in joining the program, please sign up for a 30 minute Zoom interview using the link in the description.