Notes from HCD Observation
| Observation Date: 9/1/22 Duration: 1hr Attendees: Rob Fay, Chelsea Brigg, Amy Castellani, Howard Montgomery, Meaghan Hudak, Brandy Barnette
Observations: - The team provided a review and status for existing OKRs. This seemed to be the primary objective of the meeting. Status was provided, and feedback was given to OKR POCs to facilitate continuing actions to achieve KRs.
- Good team engagement – Everyone seems invested and willing to contribute feedback
- After reviewing OKRs, the team began a walkthrough of Features/Stories. The context for the review was driven by Feature ownership/team members.
- This component of the review seemed focused on work in progress (WIP).
- The team discussed some general prioritization of planning activities to support the upcoming PI (the next sprint was designated as an IP).
- The flow of the meeting aimed to provide a comprehensive review of all team activities, aiming to afford all team members an opportunity to review their work.
- Did not get a sense of the overarching backlog for the team. How is work prioritized across team members? Right now, it seems like each team member is POC over their own siloed backlog. What are the inter-relationships between work items and the overarching HCD vision/objectives?
Opportunities: - Meeting activities could be more intentional. The flow/approach to the meeting was more “status” centric rather than used for targeted and detailed refinement of the backlog. The emphasis on providing a comprehensive view of what the team is working on/needs to do, limits the ability to complete a detailed review of a set number of features. This is effectively increasing batch size and reducing throughput for backlog refinement.
- Feature/Stories for discussion need to be identified in advance and may need to be only a subset of the total backlog. Start less, and accomplish more for the meetings.
- Due to limitations on time vs the volume of items being discussed in the meeting, the team was not able to go into a very detailed review of story writing, acceptance criteria, and sizing.
- Sizing did not seem to be a standardized/collective effort. Sizing seemed to be at each team member's discretion for their own items. This may be a team nuance/dynamic, however, if that is the case it may need to be noted/reflected in how velocity/throughput is calculated and communicated to stakeholders. This may make longer-range backlog forecasting more complicated and variable.
- The team referenced an upcoming PI Planning event, but the feature refinement ceremony did not seem to maximize the allocated time in preparing and prioritizing features for the upcoming PI. More time can be focused on planning vs statusing to expedite readiness for PI Planning.
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