What was so special about this project?

Well we decided to use a method of Agile Project Management called Scrum to redevelop the intranet.

The Team was made up of:

Aileen Xu, AnnMarie McDonald, Ashley Gray, Bev O'Brien, Brent Kilboy, Crystal Walters, James O'Reilly, Sarah Severyn, Scott O'Brien, Stephanie Taylor, Tyson Zwicker, Ying Wang & Nicole Auser (Although Aileen and Nicole were not present for the actual week long sprint they were an integral part of the planning.)

Product Owner: AnnMarie McDonald wore two hats for the week, between work periods she was the Product Owner, she made all the decisions about what features of the intranet were the most valuable. She also participated as a team member.

ScrumMaster (Process Facilitator): Stephanie Taylor was the process facilitator –In addition to being a team member I also led the sprint planning meetings the scrum meetings and made sure we all followed the process. Also I was the one to eliminate obstacles.

Getting things Done!

For the week of April 21 - 25 we all worked in the same room on the same project for a week. The whole idea with the Scrum is there is not one project manager, but a team that is accountable for their estimates and deadlines. The product owner determines which aspects of the project are the most important (or will return the most value) and the team starts at the top of the list and commits to so much of the work for the duration of the sprint (a period of work). Each product(task) has been assigned a estimate of a number representing time and effort. For us this meant that a 20 = a full day’s work. From that we estimated how many people we had and how much we had estimated, we drew a line in the sand and that is what we committed to the product owner we would get done. “Done” is an important word. We always committed to getting everything “done” which means we had to prove that something would work and was a product that we could go “live” with. By completing the tasks which returned the most value first, if the project is interrupted we have the most valuable things done instead of nothing. So each product included testing and documentation (either user or technical). It is important to note that we modified the process slightly by doing some “pre-work” for the project so that we would have least amount of outside interactions and dependancies for our week long sprint.

This process may sound ambiguous or chaotic because it is. The reality about this method is we got a hell of a lot of work done last week.

Some of the things we learned:

Will we do it again?

We all said we could do it again but take what we learned and apply it to our planning.

For more information on Agile and Scrum:

• Berteig Consulting – Benefits of Agile -
  Benefits of Agile.pdf
• Introduction to Agile Work –
  http://www.agile-support.com/system/files/Whitepaper+-+Introduction+to+Agile+Work.pdf
• Berteig Consulting- Process Overview-
  Process Overview.pdf