For those of us with limited resources, I thought I'd share my experiences with some Agile concepts over the past few months, and some of the tools I am using.
As a 1-man IT department for our organization's Tessitura deployment, I have to balance short-term "Operations" or Ops tasks with longer-term "Development" projects that will enhance our system or occur on a less-frequent basis. I leverage concepts from both Scrum and Kanban on one big Trello board. Trello is essentially a multi-user-capable Kanban board, so I superimpose a Scrum system on top of it by organizing it into the following columns:
I sprint generally on a weekly basis. The "Backlog" column is analagous to a project backlog, where the "Current Sprint" column is like a sprint backlog. Additionally, I have a label that can be applied to cards for "ops", since those items are faster-moving and should stand out. Any time a new issue comes up, it goes into the New Issues list. If it is urgent, it will be moved to the current sprint. Otherwise, it will wait until the end of the week when I will assign it to the next sprint or push it to the project backlog. As items are completed, they move from Current Sprint -> Research -> Implementation -> Completed. At the end of the sprint, or week, all cards in the completed column are archived. At this time, the project backlog is reviewed for items to assign to the next week's sprint.
Two additional columns exist for cards to go when they are contingent upon a response from an external party, or just for general notes. As I'm starting to use a Confluence wiki more often for documentation, I will probably obsolete this notes column eventually.
Another advantage of Trello, in my opinion, is that I can easily share this project board with other people in my organization so they can stay up-to-date on what changes are happening, or help to prioritize things when they are urgently necessary--or even to add new cards for issues they are having. We also use Slack for team chat, and Trello can be set up to automatically post board activity to a chat channel for people who prefer to follow activity that way.
Interested to hear comments or other ideas from the group.
We also use Trello here at BAM and find it useful.
--Tom
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718.724.8135
tbrown@BAM.org
From: Agile Software Development [mailto:groups-agile@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Nick ReilinghSent: Sunday, June 22, 2014 12:08 AMTo: Thomas BrownSubject: [Agile Software Development] Agile for 1-man IT department