It’s official: I am the Bette Midler of Agile enablement!
that's me!
On my current engagement I’m working as an Iteration Manager on a development project but I’ve been asked to help out and coach another team as they try and work more iteratively. They aren’t writing much in the way of code, it’s more about the co-ordination and roll-out of a customised product. It’s been an interesting challenge thinking about how agile principles can add value in their case but one made much easier by their desire to work in a new manner. In particular the PM felt a more iterative approach would improve communications with their stakeholders and within the team.
The first thing I advised them was to develop a backlog or master story list and not keep it in excel. I’m a big fan of some kind of big visible chart that shows everyone what is outstanding in the project. So we had a kick off meeting where we brainstormed the tasks and actions needed to complete the project (first having brainstormed what completing the project really meant!). From this the team produced an affinity diagram, grouping the activities together. This has become the basis of our project backlog cum burndown – we have a big visio model with 4 columns of tasks and each iteration we tick off more tasks until everything is done.
In our iteration planning each team member looks at the task list and signs up for what they can complete in the next 2 weeks. We also review the sign-up from the last iteration and see what was blocked or what couldn’t be done and agree how we can resolve those in the iteration ahead. We’ve even done some t-shirt sizing of tasks and assigning a simple points scale to each work item. I’ve encouraged each team member to have their own scale because QA tasks and PM tasks are completely different. But the hope is that in the next iteration planing they can use ‘yesterday’s weather’ to give themselves a quick sense-check on whether they are being over-optimistic or not.
So far the response has been very good. The approach seems to be working well with people saying it’s particularly improved their knowledge of what each person is doing on the team and that they value the visibility into the project status. At the end of the last IPM I got a wonderful compliment from the Project Manager. “JJ” she said, “you are the wind beneath our wings!”
Actually that is a great description, I always thought you a bit larger than life.
Jeff