It’s pretty tough looking after 9 projects, a lot of things to keep an eye on. It’s even harder when some of the projects use a totally different process to the others. We are a Scrum shop, we follow the scrum process – mostly. Recently a few of our projects started to use Kanban, which is a learning experience.
Keeping an eye on 9 Scrum projects is made easier by the Scrum Check that Gwyn put together. A simple checklist of things to look for each day on each project. The idea is that as it’s so easy to miss things that are not there, but should be, write out a list of what should set up, and check it each day. That way if I forget to send out invites to the next demo (for example), it turns up in the Scrum Check.
Kanban is a different process, which leads to the question of what things should I be looking for, on a day to day basis, to give me an early warning is the process is derailing.
At a first iteration, I have the following checks, (if the answer to any question is no, then thats a sign something might be wrong, and I need to investigate)
Daily Checks
- Can I see the Kanban Board?
- Has it changed since yesterday?
- Are any of the columns empty?
- Are all of the columns under the WIP limit?
- Do the columns actually describe the flow of work?
- Are all stories unblocked (by a definition relavent to that column)?
Weekly Checks
- Is there a demo booked in the near future?
- Does the client/product owner know how quickly stories are progressing though the board? (The cycle time)
- If there is a deadline, do we know what stories need to be done?
- Does the recent cycle time predict the stories for the deadline will be done on time?
This checklist is a work in progress. I’m going to be using it on the Kanban projects I can see in the next few weeks. But in the meantime if you disagree with anything, or think I’m missing something, tell me about it below – all comments welcome on this one!
