Planning makes perfect

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 33

Monday is planning day at the client. Last week we observed the graduates and how they worked. This week it is time to make some more changes to help them improve as a team. We already had a few points we wanted to address, namely estimating using a relative scale. Up to now people have been estimating without assigning a marker task as ‘small’, maybe 1-2 points or ‘medium’, maybe 5 points, and so forth. This was making it difficult for people to assign an estimated value to the task at hand.

The other difficulty was the attendees. Not everyone invited to the meeting was adding value. Planning is for the dev team, whereas we had project managers, business analysts plus or minus a few others. After allowing the surplus attendees to leave, we got the group to focus on the set of tasks required to finish last week’s story. So far, the team had not been able to demo anything to their product owner, as the different components of the system had not been integrated. When working with a customer, whether that is an internal person or not, it is important to build up trust. The team having missed Friday’s demo need to show that they can deliver, and please their customer.

The meeting was slow but there were a few key graduates who kept engaged throughout. One started to ask questions about alternative flows that he thought of. This was a great moment, as it showed he was thinking outside of the requirement, wondering about what the user would see if they selected data from the drop down list out of the expected order. I’d like to see more of the graduates questioning their requirements as the weeks go on.

The team’s scrum board was another target. It’s meant to be a beacon showing progress, but had no tasks at all on it. By the end of the day, it was laid out with a Backlog, Wip and Done column, complete with the tasks broken out in the morning’s planning.

Going forwards, with an 8th Lighter on site most of the week, our fears of them under delivering reduce. They will have, and can build up an internal network of support to get them over the technical hurdles they will face. One of the main challenges now is to teach them how to act in a professional manner. When pairing, if one of the two goes away for a meeting, or a coffee, the other strays. If they see one pair re-ordering the board, they all want to re-order the board. They need to focus. Focus on what their task is. Not worry about whether someone else is doing something more fun. They need to work well as a team, and to speak to each other with respect as an equal. One of my favourite quotes comes from Uncle Bob. In the PPP book he says:

“_People are the most important ingredient of success. A good process will not save the project from failure if the team doesn’t have strong players, but a bad process can make even the strongest of players ineffective. Even a group of strong players can fail badly if they don’t work as a team._”