Whenever I finish a project I try to have a look at what went wrong, what worked as a charm, and what I tried but it didn’t work out. Even when I get a final negative balance, the project may has been worth it if I don’t make the same mistakes again.
From some of these balances, I have extracted five of the most important lessons I’ve learned. Some are beginner mistakes, others should have been solved using simple logic but, by then, it wasn’t that evident to me. Here you go:
Agility works
It is difficult to quantify it but since I started using Scrum in my projects, the number of hours spent by functionality went down. Just doing the daily meeting for 15 minutes, maintaining project status chart that tells us if we are going well or not and a delivery every two weeks allowed us to obtain 80% of the benefits of Scrum. In addition, delivering consistently every two weeks, showing client what was agreed two weeks earlier, seemed to bring customers some comfort. In July or August, when meetings were not possible, the weekly delivery of a simple two-page document with the percentage of completion for each functionality and two paragraphs explaining the reason of those percentages, helped to restore credibility in a difficult project (especially in September when they could check that those percentages were real)
Everything is not positive in Scrum
It requires much more dedication of the Scrum Master than it would if you only were playing the role of project manager. Those 15 minutes at the daily meeting will tell you a lot about the difficulties that need to be solved to keep going forward. Trying to solve them will take you the rest of the morning.
On the other hand, having a delivery every 2 weeks can be exhausting. You cannot be sprinting for months and months. After six months you will be ending trotting (hopefully) You need to take this into account since the first planning.
Last but not least, Scrum is not magic. Whatever methodology you use you will need a team able to perform at a good level, willing to pitch in and eager to contribute. Teams like that do not grow on trees. If you already have one of those teams the project manager mission will be to interfere as little as possible.
Adding more workers to the team will slow it down
Well, this is already said for a lot of years in the book The Mythical Man-Month. Yet it is necessary to emphasize this, there are no much exceptions to this rule. No matter how tight the deadlines are: Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
Who is the owner of all this?
No matter how we call it: identifying stakeholders, designating the product owner or involving the stakeholders. At the end we need to know who will actually validate. And I do not mean who will sign the bill. You also need to know who will use the product. The project will only be successful if after delivering it works and it is useful.
In certain project, the client’s director gave us all the documentation, validated partial deliveries, tested the entire application and congratulated us for the work done. Unfortunately, when his secretary attended the training session a week before sending the product to production, she said: ‘This is not going to help me: that one is not the right template and I need to collect different data than the one showed there’ . This meant a week of overtime and extra effort and the risk of putting into production environment a product that could be unstable.
Minimum Viable Product
If you already have something that may be useful to the user, give it to it, put it into production, take it out for sale. Do not wait until you have completed every single functionality. If you remember the Pareto principle, with only 20% of them you will obtain 80% of uses of your product.
While in production you will begin to get the impressions from its users. They will know more accurately what they really need and you will know what you did wrong and how you can improve it. If you bet on a single final delivery you will have only one bullet to hit the target (to do this would have saved us a lot of problems with the product mentioned in the previous point)
Those are my lessons learned. I hope someone will make the most of them.
