Module 10 · Agile Business Analysis
"Final project: Harbourline's delay notifications"
Plan your final project, an agile delivery pack for a freight company's customer delay-notification service, from vision and story map to forecast and pilot plan.
About 20 minutes
The problem
In Business Analysis Fundamentals, Harbourline Freight's operations director asked for a GPS tracking app. The analysis found something different: about a quarter of deliveries arrive late on every kind of route, and customers usually find out only when a shipment doesn't arrive. The managing director agreed to start smaller, with a service that tells customers about delays before they happen, built by a small Scrum team in two-week sprints.
You're the team's BA. Before sprint 1, the managing director wants to see how you'll run it: what you're building first and why, how you'll know it's ready and done, when it could be piloted, and how you'll decide whether it worked.
The concept
The agile delivery pack
| Part | What it contains | Lesson |
|---|---|---|
| Vision and product goal | who it's for, the outcome, a measurable goal | 2 |
| Story map | the customer's journey, the walking skeleton and a pilot slice | 3 |
| Backlog | at least 12 user stories, split small, with acceptance criteria for the top 5 | 4, 5 |
| Ready and done | the team's definition of ready and definition of done | 5 |
| Prioritisation | WSJF scores for the top 8 stories | 6 |
| Forecast | the pilot date as a range, from an assumed velocity | 7 |
| Measures | flow and quality measures the team will track | 8 |
| Pilot plan | question, comparison, success criteria, decision rule | 9 |
Sizing the need from the data
The logistics dataset tells you how many notifications the service would send, and to whom. That shapes the stories: a service sending three messages a month can be manual; one sending thirty a month needs automating, and needs to work for the account managers who'll handle the replies.
Example
A first cut at the product goal:
For Harbourline customers whose shipments are delayed, the delay-notification service tells them about the delay and the new expected date before the original date passes. Goal for a three-month pilot: at least 80% of late shipments notified in advance, and complaints about late deliveries down by half.
Notice that the goal needs two new measures Harbourline doesn't collect today: whether a late shipment was notified in advance, and complaints by reason. Capturing them becomes part of the backlog.
Walkthrough
- Use the logistics data to estimate how many late deliveries a month the service would need to notify.
- Write the vision and the product goal.
- Build the story map from the customer's point of view (shipment booked → shipment moving → delay detected → customer told → customer replies → delivered).
- Draft the backlog, split the big stories, and write acceptance criteria for the top five.
- Open the project brief on the course page and plan the rest of the pack.
Practice
Practice
Logistics data: on average, how many delivered shipments a month arrived late (transit days greater than the route's target) in January to August 2026? One decimal place.
Practice
How many different customers had at least one late delivery in January to August 2026?
Task
8 minWrite the walking skeleton for the delay-notification service: one essential user story for each step of the backbone, in As a … I want … so that … form. Use at least four steps, and include at least one story for an account manager as well as for customers.
Your work is checked for
- At least four stories in As a … I want … so that … form
- At least one story for a customer
- At least one story for an account manager
- Mentions the new expected date or delay
Check your understanding
Answer every question to check.