Welcome to our new series: How to Ship – we’ll be talking to leaders from some of the best teams in the world, so you can learn their secrets and apply them to your team.
This week we’re interviewing Edward Hartwell Goose, a consultant at PA Consulting.
What does your company do?
We’re a global consultancy firm. We do everything! From traditional management consultancy and business change to government, health and finance industry expertise through to advanced manufacturing and digital technology – we have a broad range of skills, operating all over the world. The team that uses Sprintly is predominantly software engineers or experts in related fields such as requirements gathering, user experience or design. Most of us are based in London.
Why did you choose Sprintly?
I think Sprintly hits the nail on the head. A lot of our projects have us integrating very closely with our clients. Getting clients involved with the project in Sprintly helps them understand what’s going on and where they can help or where we might be struggling. It’s not always easy to persuade them along, but some of our clients have felt they had a much better understanding of what we’re doing because they can see it through Sprintly or the email notification updates. Because it’s a tool for everyone, I think it also trims away a lot of the cruft you get in more traditional tools. It allows you to focus on the task at hand rather than trying to assign the right metadata.
What’s your workflow for getting things done in Sprintly?
Each team will approach things differently, but my favoured approach is to divide up a sensible amount of the usually huge “Someday” pile of work and allocate it to individuals in the team. We ensure that everyone keeps stories up to date as they progress and I spend some time regularly during the week making sure we’re on track. I wouldn’t say we have a particularly scientific method, or the method we all follow though!
How do you decide and prioritize what you’re going to work on next?
It’s often driven by our clients, we’re rarely the product owners. But we’ll work with them to help them decide – for example if a big piece of work requires some architectural changes we’ll sit with them and prioritise together. Otherwise, I think we just apply common sense to the majority of our prioritisation – what’s going to deliver the most value? What do we need to do for feature X? Again – it’s not particularly scientific!
How do you decide when something is done, and ready to be shipped?
Mostly based on client sign off. We have our own internal ‘processes’, where code should be documented and tested too, but clients don’t always focus on this. This varies a lot, and it’s something I’d like to see us be better at: defining the definition of done. I’d say our workflow starts falling off Sprint.ly a bit once we get to the accepted stage, and we’ll try and improve this in the future.
How do you involve your team in the development process?
Everyone gets access to Sprintly, no questions – there’s no point hiding the information that everyone needs. And we do daily standups to make sure everyone is on the same page. With clients (product owners) we don’t tend to get them involved in daily standups, but where necessary we’ll have calls, schedule demos and discussions to make sure they know what’s going on. The email notifications in Sprint.ly have been helpful for that too – everyone gets a notification when something changes that they’re interested in. We encourage clients to ‘Follow’ the things they’re interested in. And if none of that works, I just assign tasks to people and complain when they don’t complete or progress them [laughter].
What are some obstacles you’ve had to overcome?
Getting clients to contribute to what they traditionally think is a developer tool is always a bit tricky. Especially when you’re working with clients who are used to waterfall development methods. It’s best to just take things slowly and lead them into it, and always offer to help. We eventually get there, but it can be challenging sometimes. I think some of the training and FAQ guides have been helpful, and sitting down with a client and pointing them through it always helps as well.
How do you keep your team motivated to do great work?
Cake. ;)
