My mind wonders…

Following on from my post last week, here’s what I noted as lessons learned from Sprint 2.

• Having a Proposition Up Front Will Aid the First Week of Planning (Pt. 2): I said last week that this would aid planning, I should have added requirements gathering too. I think the real lesson though is that I need to understand what the idea is and how far advanced it is. I had initially thought that if, like this project there was no clear idea / proposition that the project should be given an additional week to go through a rapid ideas generation period. On reflection though, where does that end? Will I eventually be prescribing that we put together a proposal and then go in to a design phase and then in to a develop phase and then in to testing? Frightening. The answer, well, I’m still unsure, my current thinking is that I need to consider any future projects like this thoroughly before the first week and tailor that week accordingly.
• A Small Self Organising Team Can React To Change Quickly and Effectively: This one sounds quite obvious, and it is, to see it happen in front of you or at least to hear somebody suggest that the team switch tack completely is quite something to witness. This brings a number of other lessons yet to be learned I am sure, for example, controlling the frequency of change.

There are a couple of other things which I haven’t mentioned, I’m currently composing a couple of articles one of which I intend to post soon about Analysis and Scrum.

After our proposition was signed off on Friday the team sat down, as I mentioned and drew up a revised Product Backlog (This may not be a strictly orthodox thing to do but it seemed the right thing to do for the team.) as we did so it started to dawn on me how much work would be required of the Analyst that is working on the team.

I had a chat with her today and said that I was aware of the fact that a lot was being asked of her and that my primary concern was to make sure that she would be able to focus her efforts towards the goal of the project. I asked her to have a think about whether she could do both roles at the same time. I did this as I thought that sharing her time between the Product Owner role and Analyst role would mean that she would be spread too thin to deliver effectively on either. This is no indication of her ability at all, if anything, it is more a failure on my behalf to properly understand the tasks that she would need to undertake for the delivery team and exactly how much is involved in the role of a Product Owner.

Definitely something for my lessons learned for this week…

Two things of note happened yesterday, firstly, in our second Show and Tell we showed the Steering Group and one of the sponsors the application thus far. We showed all the functionality that we had committed to deliver in the sprint bar forgotten password. I am so impressed with the delivery team’s accomplishments this week. The impression that I got from the Steering Group was that they were impressed too. It really focussed people on what we were doing too, I can see these Show and Tells working really well going forward as a vehicle which solicites feedback, particularly when the designer starts looking at the branding of the application for example.

Secondly, a decision has been made on the proposition. Anyone who has read any of my previous posts will realise that the fact that one hadn’t existed until now has been a concern. The delivery team got together after the Show and Tell to do the planning session for Sprint 3, one of the Steering Group joined us too. We reviewed the Product Backlog as it stood, however, it was thought that with a proposition it would be an idea to start with that and quickly note the requirements presented to us. Within half an hour we had in excess of 50 items on the Backlog all of which corresponded to functionality required to deliver the site. There were also a number of non functional requirements. This was fantastic, the team decided what functionality it was going to deliver in the next sprint, I have every confidence in their ability to be able to do that and more, we have another developer joining the team on Tuesday / Wednesday next week so it’s possible that we’ll take some more items from the Backlog and include them in the Sprint too.

By way of an introduction for the developer that will join us I intend to run another estimating session for the new items on the Backlog, as I mentioned before, we used Planning Poker which, at the time surprised me how much it served to aid everybody’s understanding of the requirement, I had played it when I did the Certified Scrum Master course and whilst I understood why it would be useful I was sceptical about how our teams would react to playing a game. I think that running that session will involve him in to the team and also get him up to speed on the task in hand.

As I’ve mentioned previously we’re struggling at the moment without a proposition or at least clear focus on what the target audience of our product is. What we have had from the outset however, is 2 objectives that we have been working towards. Without wanting to divulge too much, the objectives are 1, to develop a generic toolset that could be used on a number of platforms and 2, to launch a site using those tools.

Up until now the direction that I have been giving the team is that they should focus on the second objective and that having identified some tools to achieve that, we could then establish another piece of work to make sure the tools could be used elsewhere.

The delivery team had a meeting today to discuss the lack of a proposition. There have been a couple of ideas that the steering group have been touting but the team here feel that they don’t live up to much. There is however, an idea that is outside the scope of this project which is in fact possibly being lined up for another Skunkworks project, the idea is well developed and we could very easily work from it. The developer here mentioned another possible way to approach this project, he suggested that rather than focussing on objective 2 we should change our focus to objective 1 and let the steering group worry about the second.

Both ideas are great and I would happily run with both, the second however has a lot more to say for itself about the way we are currently working. Personally, I think that it shows that small, self organising teams that understand the business objectives and have direct access to the business can offer some huge benefits, this team, given 2 objectives has been working towards one and semi ignoring the other, today in the meeting one of the team suggested that we change direction, to hear the suggestion alone is fantastic, what’s more, we could easily do it.

Apparently so.

I mentioned that we were using the Axure prototyping tool the other day. I had actually contacted their sales department about something and was surprised that when I got a response they mentioned that they had seen my post in which I referred to the tool.

This lead me to then go and check the stats for this blog. Apparently I already have 4 whole people subscribing to the feed.

Incredible.

I’d be interested in hearing from any of you who are subscribing to find out how you found me and what your particular interest areas are. Should you wish you can contact me at dan dot rough at gmail dot com or leave a comment.

There has been a known issue on this project from the outset, I have listed it in the Risk Register and monitored the Delivery Team’s perception of how much it was an issue.

Last week everyone understood that the issue, which is that we don’t have a clear understanding of who we are delivering to and furthermore of what it is that we’re delivering, was going to be the subject of discussions amongst the steering group and others that input in to that. We hoped that we would get an answer as early as possible. The answers to the above are still not forthcoming.

In yesterday’s Daily Stand Up the designer mentioned that whilst she had some work to do she would probably not be able to occupy a full day with project related work, I was not too bothered by this as the developer then went on to say that he might have need to discuss some of the prototyped screens with her.

This morning in the Daily Stand Up the designer said that she would struggle to fill her day with project related work again, the team member that we have from the business who is carrying out the analysis for us mentioned that she is starting to struggle too.

This afternoon a discussion was taking place between the developer, the designer and the analyst the essence of which was that they were all starting to struggle without this information.

I listened to the conversation and I am now meeting with the sponsor of the project to try and get some information as soon as possible. I remarked during the conversation though that I was surprised at how quickly this has moved from being an Issue to a Crisis.

Somebody then said to me, “I guess that on a project running in an 8 week timescale everything happens in condensed timeframes.”. How very true.