Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re doing ok.
The photo is from an orchard we visited in Cornwall. It was a lovely sunny day and I got carried away with the camera. This butterfly was happily sucking away at an apple that had fallen from the tree. The apple was split open and had start to decompose, but it was obviously good enough for the butterfly. We’re used to getting our apples from the supermarket these days where they’re often perfectly spherical and beautifully shiny. Some of us might even be conditioned to think that anything less is not acceptable. But so what if it’s got a bruise? We could just not eat that bit of it I suppose. And as usual this leads me on to thinking about the products that we produce for our users (digital services in my case). We’re always talking about “high quality” and how to achieve it. But how much waste do we introduce by specifying our quality criteria too high? How many more valuable increments of a product could we get out to users based on their feedback if we were to lower the quality. I think part of the answer is in that common and often misunderstood phrase the “Minimum Viable Product”. How close can we get to “just enough features” to let the user get get value from the product. I dare say that the Agile principle of maximising the amount of work not done leans into this concept. So do you really know what a just good enough product looks like for your users? The butterfly knew what it needed after all.
I started this week, my return from our holiday, with a day off. This is an excellent way to start. I’d pre-booked a day at the bike park with some friends earlier in the year and the time had come. This was an experiment with two of us on ebikes and two on the uplift van. The first few goes us ebikers reached the top and had to wait for those on the van! Eventually we dialled in the timing so there wasn’t much waiting around. We managed 6 full runs with one battery charge. That’s 46km, 1.6km of climbing (and descending) and 2250 calories burned.
I returned to work on the Tuesday to a retrospective with the team. The things that went well were our return to two week sprints, which feel like they give us more breathing space, and our work on our roadmap. We didn’t have much to show at our sprint review this week and that’s something we want to think about. As a management scrum we hold ourselves to account for being super transparent with our team so I don’t think we should be too hard on ourselves if occasionally there’s not much to show. We can work on that and I think that’s better than being a management team that doesn’t communicate. So Scrum is working well for us in a management context.
One of my team mates was good enough to give me a heads up on Monday about an important planning meeting on the Tuesday which gave me time to mentally prepare for it. The meeting ran throughout the afternoon and reviewed all of our digital projects in our portfolio. It was for our service managers to build a picture of the current status on delivery to help with some strategic decisions.
I joined a training session called “How to effectively hold a stress risk assessment” which walked me through both the process and how to do it with empathy. Hopefully I won’t need to use it but at least I have the knowledge should I need it.
Goodbye’s are hard and we had to say goodbye to a colleague who’s decided to move on. They’ve really made a difference here at CH and I’m sorry to see them go.
I joined one of our scrum teams’ sprint review this week. It’s a very technical delivery focussed on backend data. I asked about the value of the increment. It’s essentially an enabler to our future cloud services and big data strategy.
We recognised during backlog refinement that our backlog is extremely small at the moment. That’s ok because it’s exactly why we’re doing our roadmap work. A task for later that week was to decompose our Q3 roadmap which we also got started on. We used MS Teams for it and while it’s still clunky and limited compared to the competition, MS have fixed critical issues with zoom controls and added features such as varioius meeting templates. Next week we’ll be following through on the Q3 decomposition, developing personas around the items in order to get to the user stories. This is our main goal for this week: be ready to work on our first roadmap items in the next sprint.
I had a good checkin with a member of our profession where we discussed the above delivery planning meeting and how we can support some of our contracting colleagues who’ll be leaving us shortly. We agreed to bring this up at our profession meeting next week.
I had a catchup with our Head of Testing about some work they’d be doing on definition of done. After looking into how teams do things and researching best practice and, of course, the Scrum Guide, they’d come to the conclusion that the definition of done should remain an artefact owned by our scrum teams (wahoo!). We might look into some work on a baseline definition of done to help guide teams but we want teams to be able to continue to feel a sense of ownership. We talked about what good inspection and adapaptation looks like and agreed that it’s about teams regularly reviewing it as a key artefact for quality and looking for opportunities to improve it e.g. a release doesn’t go according to plan, the root cause isn’t the definition of done itself but the team might be able to adapt it to help mitigate the root cause in future. Furthermore, they might consider sharing that adaptation with other teams.
I finished at mid day on Friday to go and put all my drumming lessons into practice with some friends at a rehearsal in a studio in Cardiff. It’s the only time I get to play on a proper accoustic kit. We tried out a new song which definitely needs some work and some stuff we’ve been doing for a while which is starting to sharpen up.
Be excellent to yourselves and each other,
Si
