Hyper focus and learning workflow (1-week iterations)

Hyper focus and learning workflow (1-week iterations)#

Why?

This workflow is intended to support our efficiency push resulting from our 2024 team retreat.

The goal of the 1-week iteration system of work is to:

  1. deliver work items aligned to our product roadmap

  2. support the Partnerships team in the grant writing process (supporting our short-term funding needs).

Guiding Principle - Move the team forward!#

We introduce a new principle called Principle 1 into our diction that is intended to help guide our decisions when there are ambiguities related to our process.

Principle 1; General statement that is true 90% of the time: Better to always move forward than not, as long as we are moving forward in the direction of the Iteration/Team goal. The exception is busy work and unplanned work - that will kill us - so it’s better to help someone else instead. Move the team forward. If you can’t, move a member of the team forward. Make a decision and communicate it.

Process changes#

The introduction of the 1-week iterations addresses the following:

  1. How to prevent waiting

  2. What are the different queues in the board and their purposes

  3. How do deal with getting blocked

  4. Process time-box and evaluation

  5. How will the ceremonies change

1. How to prevent waiting#

  1. Ask for help. (engineering slack)

  2. Refer to Principle 1 if help cannot come immediately

    1. Pull something new from the committed queue

    2. Help someone else (who is already working on a tasks)

    3. Avoid unplanned work

    4. Raise this in the retrospective

2. What are the different queues in the board and their purposes#

  1. The team will continue to use the github project board to manage their day to day tasks.

  2. For the next 2-months the engineering process will use 1-week sprints.

  3. To support partnerships, the product allocation bucket will be reduced based on needs to support new grant requests.

  4. Work that is not related to grant/funding raising will follow the normal product process

  5. Work that is in the committed queue is expected to be completed by the end of the iteration unless new unplanned work is introduced from support requests in the grant writing process.

  6. In the unlikely event that an engineer has ran out of work, find a way to support another engineer to complete their tasks, pull work from the committed queue, or make a decision on work to do next based on Principle 1. Note: Our goal is to reduce unplanned work. However, if we are forced to introduce unplanned work, this should be made clear to the team and should considered a topic of discussion in the subsequent retrospective.

3. How do deal with getting blocked#

Getting blocked happens for various reasons. The most common is related to unforeseen or poorly managed dependencies. The guidelines for dealing with impediments (i.e. blockers) is:

  1. Use the Engineering slack channel to ask for help (async)

  2. Avoid unplanned work (see Principle 1) and Accidental complexity.

  3. We’ll adopt Sync check-ins (15 minutes). This will help to create alignment in the team on what’s the most important tasks to work on. The check-ins are just to surface progress, what we plan to work on next, highlight things that can derail delivery. Deep-dives are addressed through conversations after the sync (e.g. “can we talk afterwards?”)

Activity Dates (Badass Team)

  • Mon

  • Tue

    • [Sync] Refinement (Yuvi)

    • [Sync] - standup (15 mins)

  • Wed

    • a.m. [Sync] Retro | break | p.m. [Sync] Planning

  • Thur

    • [Sync] - standup (15 mins)

  • Fri

Sync stand-up questions:

  1. What am I working on?

  2. What will I work on next?

  3. What am I blocked on, or what do I foresee could be a blocker?

4. Process time-box and evaluation#

We want to be able to do things long enough to have some opinions about this process. We intend to run this process for 4 iterations (4 x 1-week) and then re-evaluate its effectiveness. We will evaluate shifting back to regular 2-week iterations at the end of August (based on our financial situation).

5. How will the ceremonies change?#

Refinement

  • Duration: 30 mins

Planning

  • Duration: 1hr -> 45mins?

Retrospective

  • Duration: 1hr

  • What’s the most important thing that we need to learn to improve each iteration

  • Push filling the board outside of the sync time - Concern: Getting people online at the same time is a lot of effort, and we should protect our synchronous time for synchronous activities (i.e. discussion and alignment) We shouldn’t be spending precious synchronous time watching each other silently write things down.

Sync alignment

  • Duration: 15 mins?

  • Time: Team to choose

  • Days: Team to choose

  • Attendees: Georgiana, Sarah

  • Cascading information: How will we keep Ale, Damian, HMC, and Yuvi informed?

Partnership #support-channel TBD

Sync Tech/Reviews

  • These will remain focused on the individuals on their 1:1s

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