Battle Won

After 8 iterations, the team was able to correct more than 85% of errors. The agile project proved itself.

We estimated our tasks in hours. Nobody wanted to use the mysterious story point based estimations. The estimation process worked fairly well. We did not use any agile style estimation methods. We just did not need it. The new release was installed when the defined quantity of task passed the test. In this case, budget did not play very important role, as we worked on crises management. On the other hand, the team was ultimately committed; they did everything what they could and they enjoyed the look of the better and better working IT system.

Of course, we did estimate task. But the estimation process itself was a democratic conversation. In fact, we always reached consensus after a short discussion.

The length of daily meetings was decreased significantly. But we did not reached the desired 15 minutes. What the most surprised me was that the team had got to discuss the status of their work every day.

We did not have any special software. We used the old MS Excel. I found many different templates on the Internet and after some modification I could create an excellent MS Excel file to handle related PM tasks and even the Kanban board. The team was shared into 2 sub teams. The sub teams were located in different cities. Therefore, we installed Skype, which allowed sharing a computer screen. Such way, everybody could look the MS Excel based Kanban board from my notebook. Unfortunately, the recent version of Skype does not include this useful feature.

I would like to add some remark to the Kanban methodology. I often hear that Kanban is useful only for the support style work; I mean when the goal is to clean a production system from errors. According to this “theory” (I would say gossip), the only acceptable way is Scrum. No exception! I do not agree. I believe that the project objective determinate the proper project methodology.

Kanban is very flexible having only 3 rules and it is very powerful if you use WIP well.

In summary, our crises management was extremely effective. The customer received an almost error free IT system. The highly motivated team members did their best and did enjoy their work. The most interesting is that the inspiration for the team was not a bonus offer. Their motivation was the positive feedback they received after installations.

It was no question that they wanted to continue working in agile style. I felt the same.