PROHED: Going AGILE

Helping a startup build their agility | Freelance Project | Step by Step Guide

Imagine starting your own startup. You have the fantastic idea, you have the enthusiastic team, the energy, and all the required emotions. You set out to provide your best services, and find yourself lagging. No matter what you do, you’re exhausted and cannot seem to pinpoint the reason.

What is the missing screw in your awesome machine?

Organizing: Planning and Distribution.

This is the exact issue our team at Prohed was dealing with. With all the required technical knowledge they were struggling and over-working themselves to provide optimal results. This is where I came in, and suggested moving to Agile Framework. Following is what and how of the process.

The what part and Prohed centric examples

What is the Project?

Prohed (the company) will be the project. The biggest Umbrella.

This is called an “Epic” in Agile terminology.

Whom are we doing this Project for?

Various clients with whom the company works, are the ones we are doing this project for.

Every Client forms a “Feature”, as per Agile Terminology.

A feature can be marked as complete when all expectations of the Client is met.

What will we cover for this Client?

📷User Story is a partial deliverable (via galeria.dibujos.net)

The company/project provides multiple services to the client, like Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Management (SMM), etc.

In Agile Methodology, User Story is defined as “As a user, I want this task done, so that I can achieve <purpose>”, which means a User Story is a partial deliverable which consists of tasks. Also note, tasks should be complete in order to mark user story as complete.

Since the above mentioned services are partial deliverables from Prohed, these will be the “User Stories”.

What will be the work Done under the User Stories?

As mentioned above, tasks will be executed and completed under the User Stories.

While listing down tasks, best practice is to break them to simplest form. Example: Instead of “Approve received Use Case document” break it to:

• “Create Use case blank document”,

• “Send Use case to client with instructions to fill”,

• “Follow up with client (as needed)”,

• “Review received Use case”,

• “Send document back for changes (as needed), and finally

• “Send approval mail to client”

This way, we can track the effort involved with each and every Story. This will in turn help us during next iteration’s planning.

The How Part for Prohed

Break things to smallest chunks

As a software engineer, my approach to all problems is to break them into smaller-manageable chunks. This is also the base of Agile Methodology.

We need to break two things, the work, and the time duration.

Break the work

So I sat down with the team, and went round the table asking questions.

• What do you do?

Client based projects- Features

• Consider a new project, what is the first step you take?

User Story discussion

• What is the work(task) you do in this step?

List down tasks under user story

• Next step? Next Task?…Till the project is completed.

Break the Time

Along with making work more manageable, one more output of Agile is to manage time better, produce better results within timelines, and keep honing the results to better every cycle. Time should be broken by following factors:

• Time duration of delivery of Feature (aka Release)

• Duration of regular revisiting to the planning (aka Iteration)

Release time should be the time of the project. As for Prohed, their service(project) is on-going, we decided to have a checkpoint every Month for the initial few months.

Iteration is kept short for the initial months to get a hold of working in Agile, and it also supports their fast changing and upcoming processes.

Implementation

Idea is 10%, successful implementation is the other 90%

To successfully implement the Agile Methodology, it is very important to track it, and break everything involved in modules.

Tracking

Keeping track of work is a very important aspect of Agile Methodology. We need to track our task under following criterion:

• Priority

• Daily- to plan the working day

• Iteration wise- to plan the next iteration

• Release wise- to plan the next release

There are various tools available for Agile Program tracking purposes. I personally like Rally.

Since it is starting for Prohed, we are starting on Excel document.

Points to track are:

• Identify Deliveries (tasks and user stories) to be committed for next cycle (iteration/release)

• Identify team bandwidth and availability during the next cycle

• Estimate time for each task, and hence user story and features. Commit according to available team bandwidth.

• Prioritize the tasks- based on time involved, and importance of delivery

• Make sure to reduce the “To Do” tasks after the task is complete to track Velocity of the project

Meetings

Another important part of Tracking is regular meetings.

Each planning needs a meeting. Where the team works on working on following:

• What went well- that should be repeated in next cycle

• What went wrong- can it be resolved?

• What can be improved- open ideas to make things better.

• Planning for next cycle- Deliveries

Another set of very important meeting is Daily Stand up. In this, the whole team stands in front of the tracking board and give updates on following:

• What we did in last working day?

• What we plan to do in today’s working day?

• Is there any impediment/dependency?

Templates

Templates exists to make life easy. After at least first version is created.

In Agile, we have multiple parts where things are repeatedly used. Example, weekly report email, Use case document, etc.

For Prohed , I created templates for Agile tracking, Use Case document, Regular emails, etc. We figured out the use of these templates while we were breaking down the tasks.

Reports

One of the most important aspect of Agile Methodology is the handshake with the customer. We need to know the customer's feedback. For Prohed, the customer is their Clients.

For regular handshake between these two teams, we came up with the regular reports idea. The idea is to send performance reports weekly, and ask for feedback.

Reports will cover the following:

• Idea behind the cycle’s work implementation- Why some steps were taken, and others left out.

• Output of the cycle- Mostly SEM and SMM insights are shared here.

• Next cycle’s plan- Seeking approval on the same.

Next Cycle Planning

“To cut a tree, spend an hour sharpening your axe.”

This is the ideology behind planning for the next cycle. For Prohed, below are few things we consider during the planning meetings:

• Priority of Features, then priority of User Story, then priority of tasks for every Client.

• For SEM and SMM, upcoming events are tracked and approvals are arranged with the reports.

• Finance team looks into payments and estimates for the next cycle.

Hence with proper planning, regular handshakes, feedback, we have a fully operating, smoothly running machine.

(via gfycat.com)

📷(via gfycat.com)

Happy AGILE to everyone!