Project management salon Seventh Meeting Minutes

Project management salon Seventh Meeting Minutes

The topic of this salon is that the NSEC project team will introduce their agile practices. As the company's first Agile Project, their achievements have shaken the entire company, and they are also the reference and basis for implementing agile projects in the company. Because time is the limit, although this salon only discussed four NSEC issues, we have covered more aspects in the discussion process.

The "Code show" proposed by the last salon was implemented in NSEC for a week. The effect was not very good. The first was the frequency problem, the Code show Cycle mentioned at the last salon is weekly or monthly. The practice of NSEC proves that the unit of day is too frequent; the second problem is that the project team is too busy and has no time to summarize and separately propose their own code snippets. If there is no dedicated person to collect the Code, it is not convenient to share it, programmers know that some practices are wrong, but they are too busy to write better. In the last case, the daily code review is more effective.

At the launch of the NSEC, their agile coaches gave you more than an hour of agile methods, but most people have never heard of agility before, I am not very familiar with the benefits of agility in all aspects. Of course, I have no idea. To be fashionable, it is "implemented" agile. In the process of implementation, I feel that daily meetings are useful, and I feel that my work is under great pressure, especially when I am paired. Correspondingly, the agile Implementation of AOM is much better, and it is interesting to implement it. Of course, there was also an agile kick-off meeting at the beginning to explain the benefits of agile to everyone, so that everyone can understand and support it. Therefore, the agile project kickoff meeting is very important. In the implementation process of AOM, the role division has been improved. The ScrumMaster responsibilities in the standard definition are divided into two roles: one is PM, responsible for the project progress, and the other is the new ScrumMaster, he is only responsible for and ensures the accuracy of agile rule implementation. In this division of labor, agile coaches can assume the roles of coaches in multiple project teams.

In addition, it should be noted that due to the great progress pressure on the NSEC project, there are still a lot of overtime work. The fast delivery effect achieved by NSEC is hard to tell whether it is agile or overtime. Even now, the same is true.

PM is very important to understand agility correctly. For a while, the agile coach of NSEC relaxed the agile rules as long as they didn't follow the work relationship. If someone in the project team is familiar with agility and maintains continuous tracking, the results will be better. In the agile implementation process, many problems are raised, such as the status update is not timely and how to handle the multi-task concurrency. The NSEC project team adopts both ScrumWorks and cards. Therefore, in addition to updating the card progress, each person must update the progress in the software, therefore, the probability of missing updates is high. In the implementation process of AOM, ScrumWorks and cards are also used at the same time. But with improvements, everyone only needs to update the card progress, the progress of each card is synchronized to ScrumWorks by a dedicated person. The host of the daily meeting is responsible for this work. In addition to the synchronization progress, the host also needs to report the overall progress of the project (completed, ongoing, and not started) to everyone at the beginning of the regular meeting every day ), we also need to estimate the completion time of this sprint. In addition to regular meetings, we also need to be responsible for sprint planning meetings and review meetings. The host of the AOM meeting is rotated every week. The effect of rotating the host on a weekly basis is very good. Everyone is very motivated and motivated to learn, and project members are easy to accept some in-depth practices. A typical example is their design and documentation work, which is very careful. However, it is also difficult to rotate the host every week, that is, the improvement speed of the team's host is slow, because every week is a new person, so every week is a beginner until the rotation ends. If the agile coach is absent during this period, the agile system may be relaxed. In comparison, the rotation of the ASPI project is better, and the rotation is based on the month. The host has enough time to learn and improve. Even if the agile coach is absent, the host can assume the role of "rule maintainer.

From the agile implementation process of AOM and NSEC, there has been a situation where everyone only pays attention to the part and ignores the whole. The final solution is similar, basically, a dedicated person is dispatched to take charge of the incident. That is, our agile team still has the role of "architect.

In terms of Task Evaluation, NSEC was the first project team to introduce the "poker" backlog evaluation method. However, after the backlog evaluation, NSEC did not further track the relationship between the number of points and the actual working hours, the accuracy of the point evaluation was not evaluated during the summary and review. Compared with the AOM team and the BPM team, only the number of points in each backlog is evaluated, and the correspondence between each task and working hours is not evaluated in depth. ASPI evaluates the working hours of the point and each task, but does not track the relationship between the two. In practice, it does not have much impact on the continued development of agility if the point is not converted into actual working hours. However, compared with NSEC, several other project teams adopt a simple efficiency calculation formula, that is, "Efficiency = Total number of sprint points/(number of people × number of sprint working days )", this efficiency is the number of points that can be completed per person per working day. The current data is 1 point/person-day. Because a point corresponds to 0.5 working days, the average work efficiency is 50%, although there is room for improvement, it is enough.

In our reference book, we specifically pointed out that Agility may experience a crisis three months after implementation. In fact, although we haven't experienced any crisis, we also have some bad taste. For example, the speed of improvement errors is reduced, and the workload of backlog is increased or expanded at will. Over time, after you get used to the fast pace of agility, you should be prepared for more problems.

Another problem with NSEC is the lack of some agile elements, such as the absence of customers or customer representatives at the site, and the inconsistency with customer expectations resulting in rework. After our discussion, we believe that there are no more on-site methods for customers to mitigate or avoid: either customer representatives or product managers can fully communicate with customers, either use the design prototype to reach an agreement with the customer in advance, or create a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) environment so that users can see system changes in real time.

During the discussion, the participants came up with two classic mistakes: "agility does not document" and "agile implementation requires superb capabilities", which were refuted by everyone. First of all, let's say "agility does not document". By the way, agility only does not repeat some documents to see. Agility pays more attention to the collection and analysis of process raw data. That is to say, if the document is inconsistent with the project progress and delivery objectives, try not to use this document. If necessary, record some raw data in the simplest format. As for "agile implementation requires superb capabilities", we can know from our practice that agile implementation does not require any special preparation, it only requires the project team to implement agile consensus. No matter how it is implemented, agility is "not worse than the current situation of the project team ".

The next meeting will continue to discuss NSEC's agile practices.