Kanban 1 December 6th 2017

On December 6th, the TalentMAP team met to perform a retrospective based on the temporarily adopted Kanban style. Kanban style was adopted due to the sporadic team availability over the holidays (Roughly from Nov 15th – Jan 3rd). Kanban differs from our current approach in that, rather than rigid sets of tasks for a sprint, the technical team would pull items from the backlog as they complete tasks. These are generally pulled off the backlog in priority order, unless there is a blocker or other exception. This is an efficient method to take care of a lot of low level of effort tasks (such as technical debt or small bugs) as well as tasks the require a lot of co-ordination between frontend and backend. New stories can be added to the backlog and prioritized at any time, meaning backlog grooming becomes a pseudo-sprint planning. (Although the product team should feel free to add/groom/prioritize at any time)

By temporarily switching to this methodology for the holiday season, we would remove procedural blockers for the technical team and allow for a higher throughput with the fragmented working times. We would keep the daily status calls, but would shift to a mid- and post- season demo of new functionality.

Here's a proposed schedule where I've tried to take into account all the holiday schedule's I've seen:

Nov 15. – Standard Sprint Review, larger backlog grooming + prioritization, and switch to Kanban methodology

Nov 29th – Backlog grooming

Dec 4th – Freeze dev, merge to staging (GSA PR reviews)

Dec 6th – Demo new features/functionality merged to staging; backlog grooming

Dec 13th – Backlog grooming

Dec 29th – Freeze dev, merge to staging (GSA PR reviews)

Jan 3rd – Kanban season review, regular sprint planning, switch back to Scrum methodology

The team reviewed I Liked..., I Wish... and What If... items, and moved on to dot voting. Each team was dot-voted on using the process of every participant having 6 votes, where the first vote is 3 dots, second vote is 2 dots, and third vote is 1 dot. The themes are ordered based on the number of votes they received.

I liked...

I wish...

What if...

Kanban 1 - I like Kanban 2 - I wish Kanban 3 - I wish