Continuous Improvement Practices — Part #2 — Project Success
The story of how we started evaluating ourselves as a team.
Mid 2016, we were asked to evaluate ourselves as a team, the gap between our evaluation and the one from management was huge. Surprisingly enough, feedback from management was very positive while we thought we didn’t do so good.
The most prominent reason behind this is negativity bias. We could clearly remember what went wrong and it overshadowed our achievements. So we started thinking how we can evaluate ourselves. We came up with the following list.
1. On-time delivery
Our deadline is very often quite simple, if a project is delivered by the end of the sprint then it’s on schedule. A deadline is set with project owners for bigger projects that we then split into smaller parts that fit into sprints.
2. On-spec delivery
Although scope negotiations happen before and during the project, a delivery is on-spec when what the development team and product owners have agreed on is delivered.
3. Quality
In order to ensure an ever increasing quality, we seek to improve application performances and test coverage with every project. We also monitor the number of bugs encountered once the project hits production.
4. Communication
Before a project, the development team discusses technical options to complete the project and sits with product owners for an in-depth description of user interactions with the product.
Throughout a project we make certain that the development team and product owners are on the same page, a quick daily update is enough. Also, the development team encourages pair-programming and constant peer-reviewing.
Defining success has helped us to be a lot prouder of the work we do and is also a great way of improving. For example, we can now quickly realize when quality is down, take this opportunity to ask ourselves why and find solutions as a team. We log everything in a file everyone can access so we, as well as management and other teams, are aware of how things are going.
If you are interested in joining MeilleursAgents, we are hiring! Take a look at our job board to see if there’s a role for you!
