Virtual Sprint Week Diary, Day 2
Tuesday, November 6
Things are slowly coming together.
Three more kickoff meetings happened this afternoon, though they weren’t as well attended as Monday’s sessions. However, the smaller group sizes allowed for more involved discussions around SME’s, outcomes, clarifying sprint brief content and discussing a new chapter-like networking model that The-SIX out in San Francisco were pursuing with Google (though I downplayed it because I wanted more info).
I also put a bit of time into getting each sprint team ready for the week ahead. Each of them has a new survey out to solidify when they’d like to get together and work online, a Slack-based to-do list that they can contribute/modify, a preliminary pass at the roles and responsibilities of each team member, and pinned recordings from our kickoff meetings for others to consume on their own schedules.
What’s keeping me up at night?
Nothing yet, but I’m in a race against time.
The week before any Sprint is where I become acutely aware of what I’m not paying attention to or doing enough work on. This week is no different, as the daunting task of conducting SME interviews in six days (including weekends) is making me nervous.
The good news is that we have some SME’s readily available, due to the authors of the sprint challenges being on the sprint teams themselves (myself included with the Referral Network). Lee Duncan has been a rockstar in arranging meet-n-greets and offering to provide contacts to inform the team on two of the design sprints we’re doing next week.
However, I’m fairly certain we’re going to be doing a mad scramble for testers come Monday of next week. It’s not that we aren’t preparing… it’s a matter of attention and intent, following through on the to-do’s and getting it done.
Narrowing the field
Tonight was the last night to start getting involved with the sprint teams. There are a few folks I know (Phil Smithson and Dan Levy) who are neck deep in either running Design Sprints or preparing for workshops. But there were a few I had to cut bait on.
It’s probably only going to narrow from here.
From my standpoint, I’m measuring interest by activity and engagement. If there’s an entire team that’s not responding to requests for information or engaging conversation in a slack channel within 24 hours of a post, that’s usually a bad sign that the initial inspiration for getting together has passed.
But again, that’s not a bad thing either. If I can get at least 3–4 teams prepared and aligned to execute on a sprint next week, I think we’re in good shape.
Tomorrow will be fairly light. I’ll be putting the finishing touches on proposed roles for Teams A, B and C, while doing my first podcast recording for the virtual sprint. I’ll also start conversations with SME’s for at least three teams, and fill up the rest of my week with those sorts of involved conversations/interviews. Should be fun. :)
Thanks for reading, and hope this article finds you well. See you tomorrow!
