Scrum at Planning Labs
NYC Planning Labs is an extremely agile team. We work fast — quickly going from idea to prototype to functional software — and launch tools in a matter of weeks. Of course, being barely a year old, the team is still figuring out the details of its process. But continuously fine-tuning processes is a never-ending part of our process.
What’s Scrum?
Our process is based on Scrum, an empirical framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products. It’s an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk by means of transparency, inspection, and adaptation (which pairs nicely with our core values).
But Scrum isn’t a process; it’s a framework. It’s how we use this framework that makes our processes and techniques work.
How does Planning Labs implement Scrum?
We take on one project at a time, typically devoting 4–6 weeks to that single project and working in one-week Sprints. The team doesn’t commit to delivering a set of fixed requirements by the end of those 4–6 weeks. Instead, at the beginning of each Sprint, we decide what high-value work can be delivered in that Sprint.
Customer-owned products
All Labs projects have customers — planners at DCP who are real users of the tools we build, and who are responsible for maximizing the value of Labs’ work. It’s important that the customer knows they’re the Product Owner in the Scrum framework, and that Labs “builds with, not for.” (Some projects have a working group of customers. In this case, one person leads that group as the Product Owner.)
There are several fundamental events we use to streamline our Sprints. These events help us create regularity, optimize necessary meetings, and avoid unnecessary meetings.
Sprint Planning
Every Monday morning, we meet with our customer to define a goal for the Sprint and determine what work will be done that week.
Design session
The first Sprint Planning meeting usually takes a bit longer. It begins with a “design session” in which the whole Scrum Team complete a series of exercises that help bring human-centered design into the project.
With lots of sticky notes, Sharpies, and cut-throat dot voting, the design session results in refined user stories following this format:
As a [type of user] I want [some goal] so that [some reason].
Daily Scrum
Once a day, the Labs team has a 15-minute standup meeting. We keep it short. Any detailed conversations happens afterwards. During this quick meeting, we each answer 3 questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What am I going to do today?
- Is there anything blocking me from being productive?
Sprint Review & Retrospective
Every Friday afternoon, we invite the whole agency to review the week’s work at our demo. Keeping this is open to all is an effort to increase transparency (and evangelize our way of working). As we like to say, “Demos, not memos.”
After each demo, the Labs team retires to a quiet space where we discuss how the Sprint went. What did we achieve? How effective were we? What went well? What could we do better? We keep a running document of notes from these retrospectives so that we can look back at our progress as a team. Again, we’re continuously improving our processes.
Oh yeah, one last thing…
🎉 Slack! 💕 Slack! 😻 Slack!
We cannot stress how beneficial Slack is to our process. It allows us to communicate efficiently and effectively. We’re constantly sharing the state of our work, which makes our process transparent and inclusive. Any and all project stakeholders can participate (or lurk) and decide how involved they’d like to be.
