How points can strengthen your team’s creative process
Explorative projects with Scrum
Creative teams often find it difficult to align expectations and decide on a clear way forward. In fact, all teams have to make a conscious effort to listen to every voice and to consider all the important issues.
I’m a UX Designer at IKEA Creative Hub, the in-house agency of IKEA Group. In my last couple of projects, we’ve mixed traditional design thinking techniques into the set-up of a Scrum project. We don’t work with scrum in the same way that software developers do. But I found some benefits that I want to apply to our future, team-based challenges.
For those unfamiliar with it, Scrum is a basic, agile way to set up your project so that the whole team has an overview and can own the required tasks. Everyone understands how much effort is necessary and how quickly the team needs to work.
Sprints, points and design thinking
In a Scrum project, you write ‘user stories’ to help empathize with the end-user and to explain the larger themes. Something like:
“As a user I need to be assured that I can continue my shopping on any device at any time”
Once you decide on which user stories to concentrate, you assign tasks and points to them in order to prioritise the work. For example:
Create login prompt function — 10 points
Front-end design for phone, tablet and desktop — 15 points
This doesn’t work in explorative projects, because we don’t know yet which solutions are best suited for the ones that we are to design for.
Our job is to find out customers’ needs and motivations, so that we can create the right experiences for them. After struggling for a few sessions, trying to write user stories the old-fashioned way, we went back to a process that we’re more familiar with — design thinking.
I love this visualization of the design thinking process from Dan Nessler, which has become the backbone of our work.
We converted the user stories into team stories that are inspired by the high-level chunks of the double diamond, pictured above, so that we can discuss and agree on what, how and when we do the work. Everyone in the whole creative team offers their thoughts on how we will succeed.
A team story could be something like: “As a design team we need to understand our users’ underlying motivations for interacting with [subject]”
The tasks that goes with this team story will be around what type of research we will do and how we best prepare, execute and gather the information.
What it’s like to work this way
Planning poker — an excuse to talk about what’s behind the words
Scrum methodology forces us to discuss how much effort we need to put into each step. Planning Poker is a lighthearted, points-based exercise where we unveil our preconceived ideas for the weight of each task. On the count of three, we reveal simultaneously how many points each of us would allocate. Often, there’s a mix of higher and lower numbers. This prompts us to consider the different perspectives and to ultimately reach a consensus.
Person 1. Prepare questions for field trip — 8 points, because we have to go through a lot of background material to understand the focus.
Person 2. Prepare questions for field trip — 3 points, because I skimmed through the documents and they already point out interesting focus areas.
Agreement. OK, lets assign 5 points to “Prepare questions for field trip”, because there might be gaps in the background material that we aren’t aware of right now.
Once we assign points to the first task, the points become a currency. “If we give 5 points to ‘Prepare’ questions… I think the actual field trip is worth 10.”
With all tasks rated, we total the points and divide by the number of working days. This gives us the number of points we need to count off each day.
Total points 67, number of work days left 11 = Speed (points/day) 6.18
The challenge is to see all major tasks upfront. We might need to add tasks or themes as we learn more along the way.
It creates flexibility. But could be a threat for free spirits
If you like to start your day throwing out ideas over a fresh brew in your local coffee shop, this process (or just the word ‘process’) may sound like a threat to your creative freedom.
But if you surrender to a more regimented start with the whole team, you might find more time to enjoy that coffee and still be assured that everyone is on the same page.
Each morning, we set aside 10–15 minutes for a stand-up check-in. We share how we feel, what we did the day before, what the focus of this day will be and whether anything might hold us back.
Then we know exactly how much we have to do by the end of the day. So if you still fancy going out for a coffee, you can take a few points with you to work on and not lose overview or momentum.
Conclusion
With any type of process, you iterate as you discover what works and what you can improve. The core of our team has worked together over a few projects, so we can absorb and act on learnings in an organic way. I hope that this can spark new thoughts on how to improve team collaboration using a mash-up of existing work methods.
Want more on the subject of design thinking and agile work methods? I recommend Matt Cooper-Wright’s “The blurring between Design Thinking and Agile”.
I would love to hear what you think. Please share your thoughts and similar experiences in the comments.
Thanks to Jonathan Mackness for his insights and help on writing this post.
