I’ve been looking at moving my team at Telax to an Agile Methodology. We are taking small steps an introducing it slowly.
First step was getting the Product Manager to write User Stories instead of a PRD, which would enable a velocity in the generation of Product Requirements (which were a current stop gap). Next, instead of having 2 longer meetings each week, we do a quick roundtable scrum- and it’s scrum in the purest sense- 3 questions. What did you do yesterday, what are you doing today, what impediments are in your way? It’s fast. It’s helpful. It’s efficient and because we have it every morning at 9:15 it gets everyone’s head in the game and starts things out right.
Next, I kicked off JIRA to help manage the tasks- while we are still getting things off the ground from an operational perspective, the intent is to rely solely on it in the near future.
Next steps after that is to move all work from our current production schedule to Sprints. We’re planning out the work right now for our initial sprint and I’m excited! After that. I have made a commitment to CEO to have this completed by the end of the quarter. (So by April 1) so this is a case of under promise and over deliver because I believe we will accomplish this sooner.
What’s next for our merry band in our journey to Agile? Perhaps selecting a flavor of Agile and diving deeper into that, be it Kanban, Scrum, XP. Something we are all aligned with is that pure methodology is not something we are pursuing. We are looking at making things the greatest fit for us and it will probably involve violating some rules on pure methodology and we’re all ok with that. In fact- violating rules is part of the culture at my company.