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- The HCD Daily Scrum is used by the team to manage their daily work. The Board is composed of 6 columns representing the steps a work item can follow from start to completion: To Do, Started, Today, Blocked, Waiting, and Done. The Board is also composed of 7 lines also known as Swimlanes that represent the team members and active participants to who the work items can be assigned: Amy, Brandy, Brian, Chelsea, Howard, Meaghan, and Rob.
- At the time of our analysis on August 25th, the workflow shows a total of 56 work items spread throughout the board as follows: To Do (9), Started (11), Today (14), Blocked (0), Waiting (10), and Done (12). Also, the board reveals that the 56 work items are assigned to the team members and participants as follows: Amy (6), Brandy (1), Brian (12), Chelsea (11), Howard (8), Meaghan (13), and Rob (5).
- Observation 1: There is an interrogation about the purpose and the benefit of the "Started" vs "Today" and "Blocked" vs "Waiting". Someone may think that the work items under "Today" should be part of the "Started" column, and also work items under "Waiting" should be part of "Blocked" since waiting is a type of blocker. Furthermore, the work items are grouped under various predefined epics such as Training, HCD Community and CoP, Thought Leadership, Team Consulting, PRA, CSAT, ... It would be interesting to understand the nature of their work items and to review what processes can best fit and support the management of their work.
- Observation 2: The HCD team is working on a 4-week iteration cadence, roughly 20 business days if there's no holiday. 7 business days before the end of the iteration, we can notice that 35 work items are in progress, which represents about 65% of the work planned for the iteration. We can notice that the amount of work in progress at a time is high. Also, there are no visible work-in-progress (WIP) limits per column or per team member/participant. It would be interesting to understand the team capacity, capacity allocation, and determine the right WIP limits for each of the columns in the process when relevant.
Requirements Analysis
The HCD backlog is composed of 2 main types of requirements: Features and User stories. The Features are larger requirements and can be decomposed into smaller requirements called user stories. This section aims to analyze the features and stories.
- Feature:
- User Story:
- The active sprint shows that each user story is linked to a feature and most of them are assigned to a version.
- Each story is also assigned to a team member and is estimated in story point. There are stories with the size "0". It would be important to understand why or the rationale behind it.