Agile Workflow and the Fear of Not Knowing

All of our projects up until now have been quick sprints. We concept, design and create a product usually in under two weeks. This project is set to take the entire semester and we are still in the research phase. Getting use to a slower pace and getting comfortable with an undefined problem statement is something I’ve had a difficult time with. But to find an incredible solution, you first need to have an incredible problem.

Knowing what to solve for isn’t always clear, and for the topic of shelter there are a number of areas we could focus on. Solving for real life needs within the topic of “shelter”, which we all decided on as a class. Shelter is a topic that is difficult to pin down, because it has such a different definition depending on what culture you look at it from.

We have yet to find our exact problem area, but have found something that many don’t get enough of, nature. In our busy lives many of us are attached to our screens for most of the day. According to a recent CNN article Americans on average devote more than 10 hours a day to screen time.

Blue light has been known to affect the human body and mind in different ways.

And we are looking into how nature might help avert some of the negative side effects associated with screen time.

Discovery in the Agile Process

As we try to hone in our problem area we’ve ran into another obstacle one that might be even more challenging to take on, The agile process. Agile is a highly collaborative process, and at times some of the ceremonies of the process feel tedious and pointless. One of the biggest lesson I’ve learned so far, is to trust the process and make sure to keep your team updated. After all, if it’s good enough for Pied Piper in Silicon Valley than it’s good enough for us. Not knowing comes with a certain degree of anxiety and at this point in the project, it feels like we aren’t really going anywhere because we haven’t figured out where we’re going. Not to say that we all haven’t spent time researching, but that our topic area thus far is so wide we are all researching vastly different problem spaces.

Our team is new to agile, but trusting and sticking to the process is utterly important. For example, we must size each story in Trello, a task management software, to make sure no one is taking on too much work and that the expectation for each person is clear. At first this was something that seemed pointless, but it is now becoming second nature while allowing everyone to stay involved.

The basics of Agile aren’t extremely difficult to master. Basically each task is broken up and assigned to a person. Using a Trello board you move each tasks called “stories” from column to column. Each column representing the status of that task.

For our project, we’ve implemented these basic workflow states:

• To do — work that has not been started
• Work In progress — work that is actively being looked at by the team
• Review — work that is completed, but awaiting review
• Accepted — work that is completely finished and meets the team’s definition of done

More than anything this project has been about learning the fundamentals of agile and how to properly manage our workflow. Our project manager is doing a great job of understanding the ins and outs, but it’s not the most intuitive process and each team’s’ agile process slightly differs. Here is an infographic put together by Russell Tate that is pretty similar to the system we are using.

This process is a leap of faith, but I know we’ll identify an amazing problem and in turn create a meaningful solution, we can all be proud of.