Projects, Projects…..

 So this past week has been an eye opener for sure. As one collegue pointed out, it almost made him teary-eyed with joy. Employees were engaged. The office felt like it had a buzz for the first time in two years.

There were no going away lunches this week…

So what do we have to thank for all of this….. Scrum.

For those of you not familiar with Scrum, it is an agile methodology where you develop increments of potentially releasable software in 30-day sprints.  At the end of the 30 days you have a sprint review where the team presents on what they did.

I walked around on the morning of our first Sprint review and I couldn’t believe the energy I felt in the halls. People were in each other’s offices communicating. People were running around making sure everyone was on the same page with what they were about to present. For the first time in a long time, it felt like everyone cared about what they were doing. There was a definite sense of accomplishment and a much more connected organization.

From a management perspective, I am overjoyed at hearing from people I never got to interact with on a day to day basis in our old waterfall model. Often people would hear from me, only if they had an outstanding bug that was holding ship. Now, it is daily communication and targeted as I am actively making sure nothing is in their way of moving forward with what they are working on. We have seen new leaders emerge and take ownership of key initiatives. This is probably what excites me most. We watched a traditional QA lead demo the software that was developed during the sprint. There was no show and tell, training, or hand off. It was all shared knowledge the qa rep had gained during the course of the Sprint.

One of the key fears we typically run into at work is the roadmap being non-existent or not clear enough to present much of a future for the team. There is a lot more visibility into what is next for the product line and no question as to the amount of important, innovative work this team will be working on well into the next few years due to the product backlog.

We have some key challenges to overcome in the next few sprints and have yet to prove whether or not we can actually ship this stuff, but it certainly has me excited.

-Corey