As I have already posted, we are managing our project in Scrum methodology.
I made some changes in the original methodology in order to improve our productivity at our specific organization.
Here are some of them:
Daily Meeting:
- The daily meetings will be stand-up meeting.
- We had a problem to start these meetings exactly in time because each computer shows a different time. To resolve this problem I bought a new big clock, and I hang it in the center of the room. The daily meeting is now accordantly to this time.
Scrum reviews:
The first Scrum review meeting wasn't so productive because some programmers lost the focus when the user started to give his criticism on the product. I think it happened because we didn't have a big screen, so we showed the product in a regular computer screen (and in our room), and only a few people could look at the screen at same time.
Solutions:
- To set these meetings at the meeting room. At the meeting room we have a big screen. I hope that it will cause each team member to become more aware to all the project parts.
- Trying not to bring all of them to this meeting.
- I summarized this meeting and put the summary at the team site.
Scrum retrospectives:
· I think that the scrum retrospective meeting is one of the important meetings, but it could be a waste of time, it's depends what you do with the decisions you make in those meetings. If one of the team members suggests doing something and all of the team members agree we need to do it, we must be committed to this decision (and to avoid the situation of "only talking and be doing nothing "). I put all the team decisions in a respective place in the team site. I decide to put it in web part that looks like missions list ("missions format"), it will give us the ability to track any decision (in the next Scrum retrospective), and to check our progress.
· We decided to be more productive by using community knowledge sites of our organization, not to "start everything from scratch" and to search a lot over the net in order to find technical solutions. Try not to interrupt our friends in things that we can solve by ourselves (even if it can take more time). Use the outlook for the main communication tool and for staffs that we need from another team member but can be delayed. Improve the self time management.
Time of sprint:
· The original time of a sprint is one month. Because our project period time is very short we decide to shrink the spring period to two weeks.
· According to the scrum methodology a sprint is equivalent to iteration (unlike other methods in witch, in a month there is one sprint and four iterations).
· We gave the users more time to change their priority list of the project. Thanks to that we can avoid developing requirements that the business value of them was reduced.