Agile Estimation

First time, putting this link directly. as this post does not require references from multiple sources .. 

http://www.deltamatrix.com/agile-estimation


Regards,
Arun Manglick

Sprint Retrospective Meeting - Facts & Rules

Source:  Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber

Duration:

1.     Time-boxed to 03 Hours (Three Hrs).

2.     Occurs after Sprint Review & Before Next Sprint Planning meeting.

  

Attendees:

3.     Team, Scrum Master, and Product Owner.

4.     The Product Owner is optional

 Retrospective Procedure

5.     All Team members answer two questions:

a.     What went well during the last Sprint?

b.     What could be improved in the next Sprint?

6.     Also team members can think on four Short Subjects:

a.     Start Doing

b.     Stop Doing

c.     Do More

d.     Do Less

7.     The Scrum Master writes down the Team’s answers in summary form.

8.     Scrum Master does not provide answers, but facilitate the Team’s search for better ways for the Scrum process to work for it.

Action Items – At The End

9.     The Team prioritizes in which order it wants to talk about the potential improvements.

10.   Actionable items that can be added to the next Sprint should be devised as high-priority non-functional Product Backlog.

More Details On Retrospective

11.   Type of Retrospectives

a.     Iteration Retrospective

b.     Release Retrospective

c.     Project Retrospective

d.     Surprise Retrospective

12.   Retrospectives Improvements: Retrospective offers multiple improvements.

a.     Improved Productivity

b.     Improved Capability

c.     Improved Quality

d.     Improved Capacity

13.   Steps to Conduct Retrospectives

a.     Set the Stage

In this step, aim at creating an atmosphere where people feel comfortable speaking about things that may not have gone well on the project.

Few techniques:

·         Check-In – Ask everyone to summarize in one-two words what they hope to get from retrospectives.

·         Focus On/Focus Off

·         ESVP - Explorers, Shoppers, Vacationers, Prisoners

·         Working Agreements

b.     Gather Data

Create a shared picture of what happened during the iteration.

Few techniques:

·         Timeline

·         Triple Nickels – Top Five Ideas, Elaborated By Five Groups, Five Times

·         Mad, Sad, Glad

·         Local Strength

·         Satisfaction Histograms

·         Team Radar

·         Like to Like

c.     Generate Insights

This step involves driving meaning insights from the gathered data in previous step and make sense out of it.

Activities done in this step help team interpret and understand implications of the issues before then move on to solving them.

Few techniques:

·         Brainstorming

·         Five Whys

·         Fishbone

·         Prioritize with Dots

·         Identify Themes

d.     Decide What To do

                        In this step, team will decide what they will change and how they will behave differently.

Few techniques:

·         Short Subjects –

1.     What Went Well,

2.     Do differently Next time

3.     Keep, Drop, Add

4.    Start Doing, Stop Doing, Do More, Do Less

·         SMART Goals

·         Retrospective Planning Games

·         Circle Of Questions

e.     Close Retrospective

                        Here team summarizes:

·         What the team decided to keep

·         What to change

·         What we are thankful for

·         Where we can use our time going forward

·         Express Appreciation to each other

Few techniques:

·         Plus/Delta

·         Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis

·         ROTI (Return on Time Invested)

·         Appreciations

Keep Blogging...

Regards,

Arun Manglick

Product Backlog Grooming

Backlog refinement (also called grooming),  advises teams to dedicate 10-15 % of every sprint to this activity.

Key Players:

• Product Owner
• Team
• Scrum Master

Process:

During the meeting, everyone helps prepare the Product Backlog for the sprint planning meeting. This usually includes:

• Adding new stories and epics,
• Removing user stories that no longer appear relevant
• Extracting stories from existing epics, and
• Creating new user stories in response to newly discovered needs
• Splitting user stories which are high priority but too coarse grained to fit in an upcoming iteration
• Re-assessing the relative priority of stories
• Estimating effort for existing stories (T-shirt sizing) (Optional here, to be taken in Sprint Planning)

Benefits/Why is this helpful?

The intent of a "grooming" meeting is:

·         To ensure that the backlog remains populated with items that are relevant, detailed and estimated to a degree appropriate with their priority.

·         Groomed backlog will help streamline sprint planning meetings; otherwise, they can stretch on for hours.

·         When product backlog items contain clearly defined acceptance criteria and are estimated by the team members, the planning process does not have to be tense or overly long.

·         By dedicating a time to backlog maintenance, the team ensures that this preliminary planning occurs prior to the sprint planning meeting.

How this is different than Sprint Planning Meeting:

At this meeting, the Product Owner and the team negotiate which stories a team will tackle that sprint.

·         Time-boxed to two to four hours, this meeting is a conversation between the Product Owner and the team.

·         During the sprint planning meeting, the product owner describes the highest priority features to the team.

·         The team asks enough questions that they can turn a high-level user story of the product backlog into the more detailed tasks of the sprint backlog.

·         PO to answer questions, clarify acceptance criteria, or renegotiate.

·         Team sizes story in story points based on complexity and effort required.

·         Stories are broken down to tasks and tasks are estimated jointly in hours.

References:

http://scrummethodology.com/scrum-backlog-grooming/
http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/backlog-grooming.html
http://www.capriconsulting.co.uk/difference-between-productbacklog-grooming-sprint-planning-and-elaboration/

Regards,

Arun Manglick

Three Amigos In Agile

Three Amigo is a process to get the various roles in a Scrum team together to have a common understanding about a Feature.

The aim is to create a common understanding and shared vocabulary across these individuals.

Key Players Involved:

• Business Analyst (Could Represent Product Owner/stakeholders)
• Developers
• QA Members

Essentially, this is a meeting during which the business analyst (BA) presents the requirements and tests for a new feature.

The Three Amigos (BA, developer, and QA) discuss the new feature and review the specification. Intent is to make these constituencies to be heavily collaborative (have conversations) around the Acceptance Tests or Acceptance Criteria for each user story.

Aim of the Three Amigos process is to bring:

• Shared understanding of the requirements across the Scrum team
• Shared understanding of the tests across the Scrum team
• Consensus about whether a feature was specified sufficiently and is ready to go into a development sprint.

Here is the process in detail:

·         The BA should begin the session by introducing the feature to the Amigos. Why is the feature needed? Is it like anything they've done before? Is there a visual design?

·         The BA should also present the requirements (prepared prior to the Three Amigos meeting). These will be reviewed by the Amigos, who will provide feedback, identify missing requirements/edge cases. The requirements should be updated in the session until the requirements are deemed ready for development.

·         The BA should then present the test scenarios (prepared before the meeting). These are also reviewed by the Amigos. Feedback is incorporated until there is agreement that the test scenarios cover the feature's expected behavior. This ensures good test coverage.

·         The developer is asked to identify Dev tasks that need to be done before development. For example, do they need access to an endpoint? Do they need to see variants of the visual design? These tasks are assigned and put on the current sprint board.

·         The QA is asked to identify QA tasks that need to be done before feature testing. For example, do they require access to a system? Do they need mock data? These tasks are assigned and put on the current sprint board.

·         Regarding estimating, the Amigos should have a common understanding of the requirements and tests. This is a good opportunity for the developer and QA to provide estimates.

·         The feature/specification should now be designated as ready for development. It has been accepted by the developer and QA and is ready to be assigned to a future development sprint.

Few Things To Note:

·         Timebox the Three Amigos meeting (30 minutes to 1 hour, max). Schedule it to occur one to two sprints before a feature is expected to go into development.

·         To embrace the iterative approach of Scrum, there may need to have several Three Amigo sessions in order to perfect a specification.

·         The developer and QA involved in the Three Amigos meeting should be the individuals who will develop and test the feature.

·         When specifying a feature in the Three Amigos, rather than using technical language (e.g., the JSON endpoint) or plain English (e.g., the financial instrument), prefer to use domain language.

Finally aim is – Accept only those features in development that have been Three Amigo'd, so that features are pulled rather than pushed into a sprint.

References: https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/articles/2013/2013-april/introducing-the-three-amigos

Regards,

Arun Manglick

Great Manager

I have always believed that managers are born, not made. There are certain innate qualities that a manager should possess. However, not every person who becomes a manager has all the great qualities that you would expect to see. So, in my opinion, these are the traits that transform a manager into a great manager:

 

·         Be Approachable – Whether you have a solution to your team member's problem or not, your team member should feel free to come up to you and discuss their issues.

·         Be Receptive – You need to be open to how your team members perceive you and your actions – you need to be open to negative feedback and also discuss about corrective actions, if any.

·         Be An Example – You cannot expect your team members to follow certain rules if you do not follow them yourselves – you have to set the example and lead the path – that is the true mark of a leader.

·         Be Assertive – When a team member is going down the wrong path, you need to immediately take corrective action and guide them back – if you are reactive and just point out mistakes without any guidance on how things could be handled differently, your team member will not know how to improve.

·         Be Well Judged – Not every team member needs to be monitored or managed the same way. Some people need focused mentoring, some people are independent contributors who require some guidance from time to time, some are go-getters and don't need much support – so don't use the same yardstick for all team members.

·         Be Appreciative – Whenever your team member does well, be prompt in appreciating – if we forget, they don't forget… J Shower your team with accolades when they deserve it! It costs you nothing!

·         Be Humble – Modesty as a manager is a very important quality to have. When your team sees you as another human being, who is just their bridge to upper management and who protects them in adverse situations, the usual barriers start to dissolve.

·         Be Objective – As a manager, you always have to play fair and be objective. You may personally like some of your team members more than others, but when it comes to a professional environment, nobody can be your favorite. Everyone has to be treated equally. That does not imply that you give the same professional responsibilities to everybody – that has to be decided based on your team member's capabilities.

·         Be Genuine – Most people can see through artificiality. As a manager, you have to care about the growth of your team members, and not as part of some goal-setting activity. You have to be able to understand their strengths and guide them to use their strengths to their advantage.

·         Be Fun – Nothing endears a team to their manager more than somebody who can let down his or her hair at times when the occasion calls for it. Sometimes the fear of losing the team's respect prevents you, as the manager, from participating wholeheartedly in team activities, and this can affect how the team perceives you.

 

I hope this article proves helpful to those who are struggling as a manager or are soon going to become one!

 

 

 

 

Thanks & Regards,

Arun Manglick, (PMP®, PMI-ACP®, PRINCE2® Practitioner, CSM®, MS-Project, CSSGB, ITIL V3, MCPD, MCTS, MTECH)

Project Manager - Forecasting
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MS Project - Important Aspects

MS Project:

 

1.       What is elapsed duration?

2.       What is difference between Manually Scheduled Tasks and Auto Scheduled tasks?

3.       What is 8/80 rule?

4.       Using Calendar

a.       How do you set up partial working time for a resource, such as a portion of a day? (Pg 65)

b.      How will you set work schedule for a resource such as - 4 days 10 hours per week, 10 hours per day? (Pg 65)

 

5.       How many Type of Resources exists? (Work – People & Equipment, Cost & Material)

6.       How do you setup Cost Resource? (Pg 67)

7.       How do you apply cost resource to a Task? (Pg 88)

8.       What is Event Driven Scheduling? (Pg 83)

9.       What are different levels of Tracking ? (pg 124)

10.    How many baselines can be present? (First one is called ‘Baseline’ and rest are ‘Baseline 1 to Baseline 10’) -  Total 11 Baseline.

11.     When should you baseline? (Before you enter actual)

12.    What are Back-loaded tasks? (Pg 136)

13.    What happens when you enter actual values for task in below cases: (Pg 132)

a.       When you enter a task’s actual start date, Project moves the scheduled start date to match the actual start date.

b.       When you enter a task’s actual finish date, Project moves the scheduled finish date to match the actual finish date and sets the task to 100% complete.

c.        When you enter a task’s actual work value, Project recalculates the task’s remaining work value, if any.

d.       When you enter a task’s actual duration, if it is less than the scheduled duration, Project subtracts the actual duration from the scheduled duration to determine the remaining duration.

e.       When you enter a task’s actual duration, if it is equal to the scheduled duration, Project sets the task to 100% complete.

f.         When you enter a task’s actual duration, if it is longer than the scheduled duration, Project adjusts the scheduled duration to match the actual duration and sets the task to 100% complete.

 

14.    What are different Tasks Relationships? (Pg 142) - Finish-To-Finish, Finish-To-Start, Start-To-Start, Start-To-Finish

15.    What are techniques to fine tune tasks relationships? Pg – 147 – Two ways – First is , keeping start to start and second is entering lead times wherever appropriate.

16.    What are different types of Tasks Constraints? (Flexible [ASAP, ALAP], Semi-Flexible(SNET,SNLT,FNET,FNLT] and Inflexible[MSO, MFO])

17.    Can you set constraints on Manually scheduled tasks? (Pg 152)(Cannot)

18.    How can you force to honor the relationships over task constraint? (Pg 152)

19.    How do you split a task? (Pg-153)

20.    Can a task be split in multiple sections? (Yes)

21.    How do create/adjust different working time for a individual tasks? (Pg 155)

22.  Which calendar is applied for a task that have both Task Calendar and resource assignment? (Pg 155)

Two possible cases:

A.       If there is any common working time between two calendars, Resource Calendar takes precedence over Task Calendar and project is scheduled accordingly. E.g.

Task Calendar (3 Days) - Mon, Tue, Wed - Working

Resource Calendar (Only One Day) - Wed - Working

 

Then any task of just 5 days will take five elapsed weeks to complete this task, as one week has only one common working day I.e. Wed.

 

However you can choose to ignore Resource calendar over Task Calendar.

 

A.       If there is nothing common working time between two calendars - Then Resource Calendar gets overwritten by Task Calendar, by showing below dialog.

 

1.       Can you choose to ignore resource calendar while assigning Base Calendar to a task? (Pg 155)

 

2.       What are different Tasks Type? (Fixed Unit, Fixed Durations  and Fixed Work) (Pg 158)

3.       What is default Task Type? (Fixed Units) (Pg 158)

4.       Note: You cannot turn-off ‘Even Driven Scheduling’ for a Fixed Work Task. (Pg 158)

5.       What is ‘Peak Units’ compared to Assignment Units? (Pg 159) (This works with Fixed Duration Tasks. Increasing the work increase the Peak Units rather than Assignment Units)

6.       What is fixed cost task? (Pg 165) (Thru Task Sheet -> Cost Table)

7.       How to set up ‘Recurring Tasks’? (Pg 167) (Insert Menu -> Recurring Task)

8.       How to configure – Tasks are critical if slack is less than or equal to 2 days, instead of zero days? (Pg 172)

9.       What is Inactivating Task? (Pg 175)

10.    What is the impact on successor task after Inactivating a Task?

11.    Using Resource Sheet

               i.      How do you setup a resource’s availablity to apply different at different times? (E.g. First Week 100%, 2^nd Week 200% and 3^rd Week onwards again 100%) (Pg 179) (Ans: Using Resource Sheet)

              ii.      How to set up multiple pay rates for a resource? (Pg 183) (Ans: Using Resource Sheet)

            iii.      How to set up multiple pay rates for a resource at different times? (Ans: Using Resource Sheet)

            iv.      What is ‘Cost Per Use’? (Pg 185) (Ans: Using Resource Sheet)

 

12.    Using Resource Usage

a.       How to verify resource capacity per day, week & month? (Pg 201)

 

13.    What are different states of Resource Allocation? Pg 212  (Under Allocated, Fully Allocated, Over Allocated)

14.    Does different states of Resource Allocation applies to Cost & Material resources? (No)

15.    What is the use of ‘Next Overallocation’ button? (Pg 216)

16.    What are different ways of Resource Leveling? (Manual - Pg 217 & Auto – Pg 220)?

17.    How you do grouping in MS Project? (Pg 238)

18.    What is ‘TimePhased Actuals’? (Pg 257) – Tracking Work By Time Period – Most Detailed Level of Tracking Progress.

19.  What is the difference between Baseline and ‘Interim Plans’? (Pg – 262)

20.  What are different ways to update actual work values for a task, which has multiple resources assigned? (Pg 263)

21.  How to enter Project Cost Manually/ (Pg 269)

 

22.    How do you reschedule incomplete work? (Pg – 274)

a.       If the task does not have any actual work recorded for it prior to the rescheduled date and does not have a constraint applied, the entire task is rescheduled to begin after that date.

b.       If the task has some actual work recorded prior to but none after the rescheduled date, the task is split so that all remaining work starts after the rescheduled date. The actual work is not affected.

c.        If the task has some actual work recorded for it prior to as well as after the rescheduled date, the task is not affected.

 

23.    How you can turn off Project’s ability to reschedule incomplete work on tasks for which any actual work has been recorded? (Pg 276)

24.  What are different ways to identify tasks that have slipped from baseline? (Pg – 281)

a.       Tracking Gantt

b.       Detail Gantt

c.        Variance Table

d.       Filter for Slipping  Tasks

e.       Reports – Slipping Tasks etc

 

25.    How can you quickly display Late Tasks (Tasks are late in relation to whatever status date you set)? (Pg 286)

26.    How do you examine task cost and ‘Cost OverBudget’? (Pg – 288)

27.    Check – Overbudget Tasks Report?  (Pg – 289)

28.    Check – Examining Resource Cost ? (Pg – 290)

 

 

Regards,

Arun Manglick