As you may know, agile programming and agile project management methodologies are now quite popular. There are a variety of different methods that have come out in the last ten years. Some of the more popular ones I have looked at include Kanban and Scrum, and some of the associated software products I have seen include Trello, Jira, and Personal Kanban. I have seen some interesting articles on how to use these software management ideas to manage your personal life. See personal kanban 101. In my home, my wife and I have set up our own Kanban board just to manage our personal goals and projects. Someone I know at Nike says the use scrums in their shoe innovation teams.
As CTO at an Investment Bank, I am in charge of all development efforts for new software. Our CIO is a font of ideas who bubbles up features, ideas and projects at an outstanding pace. There was no way to implement all of these ideas. I find myself picking and choosing which of these ideas to implement, since it was impossible to implement them all. Meanwhile the research team using our software had their list of improvements and bugs to be addressed. Until 2013, I found that our system of managing all of these requests was to informal and was not fostering a team approach to setting our technology goals. The CIO was frustrated that I was the dragon at the gate filtering all innovation. The research team in frustration would only submit there most urgent requests and bug reports. In addition, we outsourced some software projects which were late and went over budget. As a result, I was feeling overwhelmed by requests, and felt unable to respond effectively to people who wanted help.
The solution we found was to adopt scrum and use Jira. This allowed us to log all of the technology requests and into a backlog. Then as a team we could review all the requests and set up focused Sprints to address specific problems. Instead of having myself prioritize what needed to be done, the team could set the priorities, with each member advocating for features they wanted.
Some of the hiccups we encountered in this transition included the Jira Software. Though it does effectively cover all you need to run scrums and sprints and to maintain a backlog, some of our users really hated the interface. The heart of Jira are the issues database, and in this software you can see this issues from many different views, boards, search results, etc. The problem is that you can't always edit an issue item depending on the view you see it in, and this became frustrating for users. I also used Trello which was a lot more friendlier in its layout and edit-ability, but was better suited for Kanban, than scrum.
Since some of the users balked at Jira, we found the key to making adoption all the scrum method work was to have a scrum master. We picked one of our researchers who was interested in software development to take a 2 day scrum master course. He then became our scrum master, and championed the adoption. He made sure we had our meetings, and made sure that issues that were brought up in meetings or informally were put into the back log, and also to keep us disciplined. He recently left, and we have now picked another of our research team to take up the task.
Before this adoption, we did manage to create quite a bit of useful software. However, as our systems became more mature and complex, we got bogged down by the maturity of our software which made any new innovations difficult since they had to marry into an existing complex system. We then needed scrum to become agile again.
Scrum became so successful, that Banking side of our business started to adopt scrums too!
No comments:
Post a Comment