No Meetings
As a Product Owner or Scrum Master
I want to understand how to deal with ‘meetings’ in an AgileBI project
So that I can change the team’s negative view on collaboration
A Massive Change
One of the biggest challenges of using Agile methods to deliver BI projects is the massive change in the way the team has to work.
Everything from the way they plan, their level of accountability, the way they interact with their team, interact with other teams and stakeholders, and the tools and techniques used are all different to what they are familiar with.
Meetings, Meetings, Meetings but not an Outcome to Find
One of the interesting changes is moving the team from their concept of meetings. To the team a meeting is something that:
- is planned in the future
- often has unclear goals
- a raft of people are invited to, often even if they are not required to achieve those goals
- is always for at least an hour in duration
- is often seen as a waste of everybody’s time
Unless its an AgileBI “Meeting”
When undertaking an Agile project, we actually see a massive increase in the amount of time the team spend together collaborating, from attending sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospectives through to constant group sessions to nut out the many problems they strike.
Initially though we will often see the usual disparaging attitude to these collaboration sessions as they are perceived as the meetings of old.
Planning has Massive Value
Once the team gets to experience the value that sprint planning delivers in helping them work through the steps that they will undertake in the upcoming sprint, they will typically embrace them with open arms. The same can be said for backlog grooming, once the team experience how constantly refining the user stories in advance helps reduce the time required for sprint planning, as well as ensuring that every new requirement is captured weekly, they see the value in these planning sessions.
One interesting example that we often see is the use of meetings to help troubleshoot a problem or clarify an expectation.
Where possible the AgileBI team is always co-located to assist with collaboration and communication. When a new team starts working together and strikes a problem, they will often book a meeting in everybody’s diary at sometime in the future to work through the issue. The same is when they want to clarify the expectation for a user story with the product owner, a meeting is booked in the future.
When running three week iterations these delays can kill the successful delivery of the sprint. Given the team are all dedicated to the sprints there is nothing stopping the team from getting together to discuss the issue when it arises, often by just swiveling their chairs around or by all immediately getting up and standing around a whiteboard.
It’s not until you point this out though that the team realise the latency that these future based meetings cause and change their behaviour.
As with all things Agile, constant collaboration is a major change in the way the team works and often simple behaviours that have been embedded for years need to be changed.
Meetings are DEAD, long live Collaboration
In our AgileBI projects, we ban the use of the word “Meeting”.
All pre-planned events that require the team to get together are scheduled at the beginning of the sprint and have an outcome. Those events are named after that outcome (e.g., backlog grooming). Any other requirement for the team to collaborate are a result of the user stories being delivered, and the team should immediately get together to ensure there is no delay in removing the roadblocks for that user story.
In a three-week sprint, every day counts.
SAS 9.4 – Alas poor Jboss, Websphere and Weblogic I knew them well
The papers for SAS Forum 2013 are published over at http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings13/ We have had heads up on some of the major changes in SAS 9.4 for a while, but as none of it was official (and I don't seem to have the time to gossip as much as...
SAS VA – iOS, Flash and Android interfaces
Tricia blogged some interesting questions about SAS Visual Analytics today over at: Are You a SAS BI Geek Seeking Visual Analytics Answers at #SASGF13?. Unfortunately I can't make it to San Fran SASGF13 to sit through the SAS VA sessions, but we are rapidly executing...
Putting back tabs in SAS WRS 4.3
In SAS Web Report Studio 4.3, users can set an option that will display navigational tabs for report sections, similar to the tabs that appeared in version 3.1. To set this property, make the following changes to the SAS Web Report Studio properties in SAS® Management...
So who has the best Sausage Rolls in Wellington?
One of my favourite part of a project, is celebrating success at the end of it. Today we were privileged to celebrate with one of our great customers via a sausage roll-off. The challenge was to find the best sausage rolls in Wellington. We got pipped at the post...
Adding Login back to the SAS 9.2/9.3 Portal
If you need to display the login link on the portal after a user has logged out, Angela has posted how to do it here: http://blogs.sas.com/content/bi/2010/11/23/save-user-frustration-by-adding-the-magic-log-back-in-button/
OptimalBI to open new office in Caymen Islands
In a press release today OptimalBI announced that after being in operation for 5 years in the Wellington region they have decided to expand and open an overseas office, in the Caymen Islands. OptimalBI has grown from a small company in 2008 that focussed on delivering...
Adding WRS to Portal in SAS 9.2 / 9.3
Want to add Web Report Studio as a link in the SAS 9.2/9.3 Portal with single sign-on? Add a Portal application using the following url: http://<your server>:<your port>/SASWebReportStudio/logonFromPortal.do
Whirp, Whirp, Whirp, Please hide the Export button in SAS Web Report Studio
As many Kiwis will attest there is a serious focus on Privacy of information within New Zealand Central Government at the present moment. So it was not a surprise when a customer asked if it would be possible to hide the export option from the SAS Web Report Studio...
eeny meeny miny mo – Who’s on your team?
When you are putting together the roles and responsibilities to implement a Business Intelligence or Data Warehouse project, you probably have the following roles defined: Team Lead Designer / Data Modeller ETL Developer BI Developer Im assuming the Initiation,...