Making them Agile
There are many teams out there that try to adopt sprints, agile methodology, and the Aatlassian suite.
As I stepped in, I realized that the teams were using Jira and tracking things in sprints. Unfortunately, without a true producer and scrum master available in house, they were far from utilizing the software’s full potential. The overall development cadence was not measured properly, and team capacity was always up in the air.
During my few months, I eased the teams into scoring task effort with the Fibonacci Sequence:1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.
The Fibonacci sequence also forces your team to make a choice. When faced with a larger task, "is it an, 8, a 13 or a 21?" There is no in-between. This helps your team group and differentiate the size of tasks.
We also implemented ear-marking the end of a sprint with a team retrospective, done via Confluence.
Right after the retro, I implemented a visual deck to kick-off the next sprint. The deck allowed us to mark goals and inform the larger team of the trajectory and intention moving into the next 2 weeks.
Sprint Task Planning
Scoring & Prioritizing
Fill Future Sprint
Retro the Current Sprint
Kick-Off New Sprint
None of this is new, but building a process that works for a specific team and its product is essential to the development process.
It took close to 3 months to get the wheels spinning smoothly, but we got there. Now we are a well-oiled machine!