Scrum Fast, Furious & Effective Emerce Eday 2010

Editor's Notes

1. Fabrique is a multidisciplinary agency with offices in Delft and Amsterdam. In 1992, 3 young guns started Fabrique, which has since grown into an agency with more than 85 enthusiastic artists, engineers and storytellers. These Fabrique-rs work with pleasure and passion on a wide range of assignments for consumer brands, service-sector companies, the government, education, the entertainment industry and cultural institutions. Emerce eDay offers a glimpse into the future of online business and marketing in one day. On eDay you will find new strategies, case studies, concepts and technologies of e-business, brought by top national and international speakers. In recent years, eDay proved to be the leading e-business event in the Benelux. At Eday 2010, some 1500 decision-makers in the field of interactive marketing, media and e-business come together.
2. The project starts at its most abstract level, finishes at that level, and then drops one level to the next. For example: strategy > functional design > interaction design > visual design > development > implementation. The people who designed Scrum acknowledged that waterfall is not the best method for every project.
3. What are we going to put in, how complex is that. And long discussions abour scope, always lead to...
4. How big do we want to make this project? At what investment will we have sufficient results to achieve our goals?
5. ... then they come...
6. Always briljant. But nog always an answer to your business challenges or what you’ve asked for.
7. You’re getting closer and closer to your target, but you cannot prevent…
8. “ coming soon…” And what’s much worse…
9. “ No Martijn, the designs aren’t DEF yet.
10. And while you are going through Excell Hell with planning-sheets, re-planning and content inventories, it turns out that…
11. it turns out that the design cannot be built. And then when it is finally built…
12. … Then the built product does not resemble the design.
13. Strictly, Scrum is a project method that falls within the Agile framework of thinking. Two years ago, we discovered Scrum Since then, we have applied it with great fun and succes, for a large number of customers (Dutch A-brands in retail, insurance, fashion, etc.).
14. The problems of waterfall that I just mentioned are alleviated by Scrum in three ways: Certain supply – you will get what you want Short Time to Market – you will get it when you want it Quality – you will get the product that enables you to achieve your goals. These will be the chapters from here on, with finally: where is the catch?
15. Starting out with scrum basics: to the left you see a scrum board. The purple postits are the three chapters, or “Stories”.
16. There are a number of points I will make per chapter, or in scrum language: there are a number of Tasks per Story.
17. Every task I start at, moves over to Checked out. As soon as its done, it moves to…done :) This way you keep a good overview of the status.
18. To the right you see a real scrum board. It is immediately visible that the sprint has only just begun.
19. And on this scrum board you can see clearly that the sprint is well underway.
20. All stories together form a product backlog A part of this backlog is picked for a specific sprint A project consists of several (2-10) sprints* Every sprint has a very concrete deliverable. * = our experience is mainly project based, not so much operation based, using sprints as iterations for a single product.
21. All the action happens in the scrum room. All the team members are together there. The planning is on the wall, as are the designs and so forth. There is a very physical project reality, as opposed to the very computer based environments we have gotten used to with waterfall.
22. - Scrum master is Sr. UX Designer This is key: the product owner, or customer is an integrated part of the team. He or she is connected with other stakeholders within her company There is room for input from various specialists, such as SEO, Usability testing, et cetera.
23. Within the scrum team, tasks are shared, as are ideas and doubts. In this picture, the first idea sketches of a project are shared and discussed.
24. By enabling ad-hoc communication, surprises are kept down to a minimum.
25. In this picture, people from Fabrique sit together with two people from the customer to work out the navigation around a broad product range in a webshop.
26. Continuous evaluation is critical. Although waterfall allows for it, it is not built in the process. However, in scrum, a daily standup meeting assures that the project status is at all times know, enabling the team to act accordingly. Progress is discussed, and the intentions for the coming day. Also, dependencies between team members or of the outside world are mentioned.
27. On this burndown chart, you can see if the sprint is going as planned. Vertical axis is the amount of work that has to be done. the horizontal axis is the time, measured in sprint days. Every day, after the daily scrum, this graph is updated. Again, the visual, the physical, helps you.
28. A big goal of scrum is to eliminate waiting times.
29. Here you see only one of many possibilities to work parallel with different disciplines, in sprints. Here, three disciplines start at the same time. When the sprint progresses, the types of work changes, for instance from designing tot testing.
30. In just a number of weeks, a complete (part of a) working product is delivered. Not just PSDs or PNGs, but actually built pages, filled with actual content, served from an actual CMS.
31. Important thing for the timeboxing to work is that not everything has to be worked out or described to the last byte. Often a sketch will help enough to communicate between designers and developers. Here you see a sketch that indicates scaling, for a Dutch fashioin brand e-shop. This goes especially for in-between deliverables such as wireframes.
32. However, never cutting corners. A proper definition of done ensures that the end-products always have high quality.
33. In sprint 0 all preparation is done. For example the creation of user insight with the aid of participative design, card sorts or interviews.
34. … or the creation of use cases and persona’s
35. Also, defining technical architecture is done in this stage.
36. And brainstorming functionality, in order to fill the product backlog. The product backlog is filled in sprint 0, only to be adapted later on.
37. All in all, we do everything to prepare the team for the actual sprint 0 and make sure everybody knows in what direction to sprint.
38. As a team member, you often write your own tasks
39. Together, you estimate how much work Stories are to complete. This is called planning poker.
40. Every day, it’s your call which tasks you choose to execute.
41. And the next day, you yourself may take full responsibility for your progress. Of course, this loop creates a big sense of responsibility.
42. and also the power to make decisions. Scrum is high paced, there is little time for a product owner to keep discussing decisions big and small with his or her stakeholders. Without enough independence, the scrum team is called back too often and progress suffers.
43. In order to Scrum successfully, a scrum team must be open, personal, reflective, friendly, honest and direct. A succesfull team can be found having a beer in the local pub with as much ease, as delivering a razor sharp and snappy daily standup.
44. ...get out of the kitchen. Scrum is intense and challenging. It is open and transparent. Your competence and your challenges are visible. This is true especially for agencies. An agengy has to have good confidence in their ability to deliver value for money within a very visible time box. Also, are you prepared to open up your decision making process and include the opinion of the customer, even in the early stages of design? If the answer is yes, nothing stands in your way.
45. If you have applied scrum once to your design process, you will never want to go back. Also, we get this a lot from our customers. Scrum is a real eye-opener. I would like to call upon you to dive in and go Scrum!
46. More on this? See my articles on Scrum, on the Dutch blog Frankwatching http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2010/05/05/een-website-ontwerpen-met-agile-design-en-scrum/ Twitter http://www.twitter.com/pieterj Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/pieterj Fabrique http://www.fabrique.nl/