My Agile Team: On Time Estimates
Welcome to the second installment of my new series, My Agile Team, where we’re following my team’s progress in getting more Agile and in moving from one project to multiple projects. Right now, we’re still trying to put out fires and finish up the big project. We hope to start adding in things from our other projects in a couple more sprints.
The fires I mentioned are our term for the emergency stuff that pops up and has to be taken care of Now. This is usually things that customers will see; their bill being the most important. These seem to still pop up every couple of days so we have to drop our Sprint tasks and take care of them quick, fast, and in a hurry as my Dad says. It looks like we’ve probably stomped out the bulk of the underlying problems causing the most important fires so this coming week I’m hoping will be a little less crazy (of course now that I’ve said that, we’re in trouble). Once we all have some distance on these issues my goal is to do a deep retrospective just on these issues that have come up since Go Live and see if we can root out anything we should have differently for next time.
One thing I’m struggling with right now is trying to get the Higher Ups to understand why we shouldn’t use real time estimates on the stuff left on the big project. Read on for my thinking on this and how I’m trying to influence things.