Scrum and the User Experience Team

What follows is an email republished here with permission from our Director of User Experience, Julie Cabinaw.  Julie agreed to let me blog her slightly modified email to show how pervasive Scrum has become in our company.  We are not just using Scrum with developers, but with a User Experience Team, database folks, content writers, foreign language translation coordinators, and the list is growing every day.  Scrum has truly become the ubiquitous way to do work at Healthwise.

Julie’s Email

All,

Monday the UET entered the world of Agile.  Planning occurred on Monday and will follow the standard two week iteration as are all other development teams.  Leslie is the scrum master and will facilitate this team. (Thank you Leslie!)

What does this mean to you?

• This is all about helping the UE team stay successful and focused on work that is most important to our mission.
• The UE team will be working on fixed two week iterations.  We will plan every other Monday.  The team will be asked to commit to the work that they are picking up.  This means that new work coming in during an iteration will be difficult for the team to commit to and may become an impediment to the teams success.  It is necessary to have work defined prior to a planning meeting to make this successful. 
• Work will be added to the UE backlog from a number of sources but mostly through project plans already in place.  PMO will build the initial backlog and help prioritize the work based on go-to-market timeline commitments.
• Every day the team will meet to discuss what needs to be done and raise any impediments that prevent them from getting the work completed.  Impediments will be removed as quickly as possible.

What does this mean to the team?

• Better planning is needed to be able to commit to the two week iteration.
• The team can focus on the highest priority work.
• The team will have a velocity that can help make visible the amount of work that the team can accept.

The UE team burn down is published below. 

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Thanks,

Julie C and Leslie