Are presentations considered "documentation" when applying Agile and Scrum to BI?

Question

I'm in a Business Intelligence analytics group that has started trying to adopt Agile and Scrum over the past 6 months or so.

As data analysts, our group doesn't develop any software or write any documentation. We pull data, run statistical models, and present our findings in either PowerPoint or Tableau.

During our first Retrospective, the leader of my small group kept referring to the Agile principal of

Working software over documentation.

While no one in the group has ever written any documentation for anything in the past he says that

We shouldn't spend too much time writing documentation, so just make a screen recording of yourself explaining your statistical modeling code and that will be our documentation

No one has actually done this though, because none of our business clients have any interest in it.

I tried saying that I think the analogy of "documentation" in our group would be the PowerPoint and Tableau presentations, as they are our way of documenting what we did and the conclusions of our work.

Is this valid?

Incidentally the small group leader selectively misinterpreted this idea and responded:

Good point. Presentation is the most important thing we do. We need to invest more time on presentations and ask the business to give us more training on making good presentations.

To his point, half the time the leaders in our group totally disregard the statistical analyses as not coming to the conclusions they wanted to make, and they just spend all of their time on PowerPoint presentations with made up results...

Answer 1

Short answer- Sounds like you are doing the right thing.

The agile manifesto is actually officially titled "Manifesto for Agile Software Development", so it is naturally very skewed towards software.

In the last fifteen years though, we have discovered that the values and principles are applicable to almost anything where you start with a vision and end up with some kind of result. To this end you will commonly now see the second Agile value written as:

"Working Product over..."

or

"Shipping Product over.."

What you demonstrate in your Sprint Review is actually driven by the definition of what you are building. When you are deciding what to build, one of the key questions is "how do we know if we are done." One of the tricks to answering this question is to ask "how will we demonstrate what we've done."

A video of you showing what you are doing may be the answer.

A PowerPoint presentation with the final results may be the answer.

At the end of the day, is the customer satisfied with what you are shipping is your ultimate test of if your demonstrating the right thing.