Scrummin’ it
For our collaboration with the Development Team (WDI) we took our first crack at an Agile work environment, embracing the Scrum process. Our team’s challenge: create a website for school nurses and doctors to communicate in an urgent care-type capacity, with a portal for parents to sign up their children. Without the guide of a seasoned Scrum Master, or actual Product Owner, first time self-guided methodology is not so different from stabbing in the dark. But being capable, motivated and well adjusted, we did out best to embrace the process, even as novices.
Knowing we had weeks of design work to complete before we could actually pass our deliverables to the Dev team, we agreed on check-ins and progress reports for them. Show them user stories, flows and lo-fi mockups in a few days, wires by the end of week one, with a fully developed design, packaged for hand-off, by the deadline.
Determining the overall scope, we found it helpful to work backwards. We need a dev-friendly, high fidelity mockup packaged in 2 weeks? Well we took to our boards, and task boxed “completed hi-fi Sketch mockup”, due the day before. After that we reversed tasked the project, lo-fi, wires, paper sketches, personas, profiles, and on. Eventually we landed on research as our first step. Brainstorming and listing our various resources, we assigned sprints for each design team member daily. The sprint might be just to show progress on a particular task. We worked our way toward our goal, a little at a time, over the broad surface of our project.
Our team really embraced the Stand Up. At the beginning of the work day and at close, we would share what we did, what we were going to do, and blocks if we had them. This was by far and away the most helpful portion of the Scrum process for me personally. The sense of attainable sprints, team accountability, and check-in/pleas for help were a great way to not let any one team member drift too far for too long. This twice-daily refocus was the gift Scrum gave me for the project, and something I intend to embrace for future collaborations.
