Well, I thought that I had enough requirements listed to get started on a few scrum sprints. Within a week I had a working prototype. What I didn't realize or make clear was that the department chief thought that was it. Done. In one week!!!!?? I guess she thought I was able to do waterfall method in 1 week. But here we are 5 weeks after the first meeting and every week i've sent screenshots and change logs for her to look at. Telling her to open the browser and look at the product and test it out. I would get feed back like "this is awesome!" and "you're a genius!" Finally here we are week 6 and while in her office I get her to open it up in a browser and look at it. What does she say? "This is all wrong. This won't work at all." I didn't call her out and say "but I sent you screenshots." Instead I said, "ok no problem we can fix it and it's better that you caught this now rather than 3 months from now." Lesson learned: don't even start scrum until you are 10000% clear on all the business requirements and maybe even don't start the next sprint until you get a face-to-face meeting to discuss progress. Otherwise you will get emails like "you're a genius!" but really they never looked at your prototype and you keep working several sprints into a project before they finally LOOK at the prototype. Ridiculous! Stories and getting people really really on-board. Plus, I should have gotten a lot more commitment from management about removing impediments. It was basically impediments to a face-to-face meeting that killed me in this phase of the project. I'm still not totally dead yet, but damn this really knocked me down. I would advise anyone to really focus on stories and focus on impediments or you will be screwed. Please explain how you communicate to the customer that you will be doing agile method. I guess from the intro to this video you let them chose waterfall or agile.
Well, I thought that I had enough requirements listed to get started on a few scrum sprints. Within a week I had a working prototype. What I didn't realize or make clear was that the department chief thought that was it. Done. In one week!!!!?? I guess she thought I was able to do waterfall method in 1 week. But here we are 5 weeks after the first meeting and every week i've sent screenshots and change logs for her to look at. Telling her to open the browser and look at the product and test it out. I would get feed back like "this is awesome!" and "you're a genius!" Finally here we are week 6 and while in her office I get her to open it up in a browser and look at it. What does she say? "This is all wrong. This won't work at all." I didn't call her out and say "but I sent you screenshots." Instead I said, "ok no problem we can fix it and it's better that you caught this now rather than 3 months from now." Lesson learned: don't even start scrum until you are 10000% clear on all the business requirements and maybe even don't start the next sprint until you get a face-to-face meeting to discuss progress. Otherwise you will get emails like "you're a genius!" but really they never looked at your prototype and you keep working several sprints into a project before they finally LOOK at the prototype. Ridiculous!
Stories and getting people really really on-board. Plus, I should have gotten a lot more commitment from management about removing impediments. It was basically impediments to a face-to-face meeting that killed me in this phase of the project. I'm still not totally dead yet, but damn this really knocked me down. I would advise anyone to really focus on stories and focus on impediments or you will be screwed.
Please explain how you communicate to the customer that you will be doing agile method. I guess from the intro to this video you let them chose waterfall or agile.
Thanks thats an important tip I wasnt aware of.
Great video
very good!!!