The Agile Agency
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Transcript of The Agile Agency
threetwelve creative
An Agile Agency
THREETWELVE & YOU
• The Scrum Question: How can we better deliver product to our customers?
• Scrum, an Agile software development process, has been in
use since the 1990s. It is what ThreeTwelve is adopting to create the Agile Agency approach.
• Developed because long-term project planning methodologies like Waterfall are inaccurate, and place emphasis on top-down process
HISTORY
KEY AGILE PRINCIPLES
3 Collaborate more
with clients
4 Focus on delivering a
workable product instead of documentation about
a product
1 Communication
with parties is more important than SOPs
2 Be open to change
Elevate people over process
BETTER TOGETHER
• ThreeTwelve has thrived not just because of exceptional work, but also because of exceptional relationships.
• Clients repeatedly call out ThreeTwelve’s collaborative nature and the personal relationships they form with us.
It’s in our agency DNA to elevate people over process
EVEN BETTER TOGETHER
• That said, ThreeTwelve is a business and we need efficiencies and processes in order to operate and to be able to scale.
• Our clients are also businesses, and we should delight them by safeguarding their interests and meeting their needs.
AGILE-Y-ER
• Agile pulls our clients into the process by making them stakeholders in everything we do.
• Of course, any business’s clients are stakeholders – but in a traditional agency/client model clients have much less input into the process and there is much less transparency.
AGILE ROLES
Stakeholders - Client team members
Cosmic Overlord – ThreeTwelve member;
keeps process on course
Creative Team – ThreeTwelve staff
Product Owner – Main client POC
AGILE PROCESS: THE SPRINT
• The Sprint is the core time unit of the Agile process. At ThreeTwelve our Sprints are two weeks (10 business days)
• Short Sprints allow us to deliver products regularly and to
rapidly make iterative changes to improve our process
• All work that is taken into a Sprint should be completed in that Sprint
The Sprint - Tasks
• Work to be done in a Sprint is broken down into tasks
• Every task is assigned a point value that indicates its relative difficulty to complete
• Points are NOT time-correlated. Possible points a task can be assigned are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 or 21. A one-point task is easy. A 21-point task is difficult and likely to take the whole Sprint.
The Sprint - TASK POINTS
• The point system reflects that we as humans are relatively accurate at predicting the time to accomplish easy tasks, but wildly inaccurate at predicting larger, longer-term tasks
• Points allow us insight into what our true workload capacity is
• Better insight means better planning, and better ability to complete workload.
THE SPRINT - TASKS
• The ThreeTwelve team for a client has a maximum point capacity that it can accomplish in any given Sprint
• The sum of points for tasks taken into a Sprint should equal the team’s capacity
• Matching task points to team capacity ensures tasks brought in to a Sprint are completed.
• Tasks can be in any of these discrete states: Backlog, Current, Working, Done
The Sprint BOARD
The Sprint BOARD
• The Sprint Board is a visual representation of all the tasks in a Sprint
• There is a column for each state a task can be in
• As a task changes state, it’s moved to the appropriate column.
Lifecycle of a Task - Backlog
• All tasks begin life in the Backlog, which is a running record of work that needs to be done. The Backlog is the only state that spans Sprints.
• At a planning meeting that happens before each Sprint, clients identify tasks and prioritize them.
• ThreeTwelve decomposes tasks where necessary, and assigns point value. Final prioritizing can be done after any task decomposition.
Lifecycle of a Task – Current
• During the planning meeting, tasks are moved from the Backlog state to Current state until the team’s point capacity has been reached
Lifecycle of a Task - Working
• When a ThreeTwelve team member is ready to start working a task, they will put their name on it and move it from Current Sprint to Working On
Lifecycle of a Task – DONE
• When the task has been completed, it is moved from Working to Done.
• If it’s a task that has been decomposed to also have a “Client Review and Changes” task, that task is then moved into the “Working” state
BUT WHAT ABOUT • Client needs can change, even over the course of a single
Sprint.
• ThreeTwelve capacity typically will NOT change over the course of a Sprint
• If new tasks arise that must be completed during a given Sprint, the tasks are decomposed, given point values, and brought in
• A matching point value of low-priority tasks is then moved from the Current Sprint back to the Backlog.
FAQs
• Q. What if a task will take longer than one Sprint?
• A. It should be decomposed into a set of smaller tasks, giving everyone a better idea of what’s done and what remains to be done
FAQs
• Q. Can we see the Sprint board?
• A. Yes. In the traditional Scrum environment, tasks are written on yellow sticky notes and stuck onto a physical Sprint board or wall. Stakeholders can come by at any time, look at all the sticky notes, and be apprised of Sprint progress.
ThreeTwelve uses a web app called Teamwork and have structured that to resemble a Sprint board pivoted into rows instead of columns. We will invite client team members to have access to that board so that you can see at any time during a Sprint what we’ve done and what we’re working on. We’re also working on our own Agile Agency software purpose-built to meet the needs of our agency and our clients.