#implementtion

[vladonikolovski-blog]

Last stage - Implementation

Our group has been reduced from the initial 6 people to a smaller group of 3, Alex, Nichole and me. In our last meeting, we discussed our final product, a small booklet for the promotion of Napier ExchangeFest, event for a British student to study abroad.

[easybacklog-blog]

Implementing iterative development iteratively

The basics

I recently started introducing some agile values and principles to the dev team atTMW but I didn't particularly think that we would en up doing scrum as agencies are not always an easy place to do iterative development.

In a true agile way we simply concentrated on team dynamics and communication as opposed to processes and methodologies.

  Small steps

Instead of using scrum we started iteratively introducing scrum techniques on some projects, every time we got comfortable with the techniques we introduced new ones.

We only did this on projects that were appropriate and it was always a team decision to do so. The techniques got the team dynamics going, the stories and planning helped with commitment and it helped us deliver difficult and time challenged projects and got people in the agency talking about this new way of working.

  Are we ready now?

The really interesting and wonderful thing about iteratively implementation is that we got to a point where some team members expressed frustration at not being able to know real progress and be able to react to time booked against their project to ensure less interruptions, better time management and ultimately deliver on time and on budget.

We are now ready

We had a meeting and discussion about planning, estimation, iterations and scrum techniques.

We decided not to impose any methodology yet but we now require certain rules to be observed:

write stories if you can

plan and estimate

check your planning estimates against the original quote and mitigate any resulting discrepancies with the team

catch up daily and update progress (with a board, spread sheet, whatever you like)

work in work chunks or iterations to be defined by the team

The team is now on board and keen to learn and most of them are curious and engaged with scrum and its techniques.

We are now writing stories with acceptance criteria and BBD scenario usingeasybacklog.com, we print story cards with the very useful easybacklog.com double sided print functionality and get our scrum boards hand made by the design department!

We still have a lot to learn but this is the first step towards working better together.

  Conclusion

A sudden switch to a new methodology can work but requires huge levels of training, evangelising, organising and commitment from individuals and it can be a big gamble.

Starting with values and principles and iteratively implementing new ways of working can work wonders, everyone is involved in the implementation, can see results and team members tend to go further, they are engaged and motivated to improve the status quo.