A few days ago a customer/product owner asked us for an estimate of the completion date for a project. None of the developers responded, so the Scrum Master is pressing for an estimate.

The state of our incomplete information is thus:

• There is an incomplete product backlog, it contains almost every item for a first release with estimates in ideal days. It also contains all the backlog items for the second release, but with no extra information and no estimates.
• At least 16 reports are just completely missing from the product backlog altogether.
• We have use cases for almost everything in the first release, but not even high level use cases for the second release items.

The answer was easy we looked at the product backlog and came up with about 150 days for the first release backlog items. Our current velocity is about 60 ideal days per Sprint. So the estimate would be 2.5 more Sprints as of today and assuming everything in the Product Backlog still needs to be completed.

The Scrum Master thanked us for that effort, but then asked if we could just get a ‘gut check’ estimate on both releases. Our answer so far is still no, not enough information. Until we do an estimating effort on the second release items and get some information on the reports we can’t honestly give any sort of ‘gut’ estimate.

The plan tomorrow is to go through the second release product backlog items and estimate them one by one, probably just by asking questions of the product owner. This may take longer than the 1 hour planned for, but the team isn’t going to get an estimate any other way. ‘Gut’ estimates are just a slide back into the scary nether-world of Waterfall.

I took a personal day this past Friday after realizing I was just burnt, fried, and generally stressed and not that useful. I pondered whether I should or not for far too long. The reason for the difficult decision–I didn’t want to give up control of several projects.

I’d been planning to take a personal day for the past several weeks. Our fiscal year ends in September so the last few weeks tend to be insanely busy despite any amount of preparation. I ended up coming in on at least one weekend day for 3 weeks in a row on top of several really late nights during the week. Every time I thought things would calm down enough to safely take a personal day, some new project emergency came up.

So this Friday I finally just went ahead and took the day. Friday included a planning meeting on a new Proof of Concept (POC) project for the second two week Sprint. I had planned to lead the meeting, but I finally decided I really needed to delegate it to a PM and one of the developers on the project.

Delegation is still something I can tend to struggle with especially when it comes to things like running Agile projects and acting as the Scrum Master. I’d told the PM on the project for the past two weeks that I’d get her up to speed on how Scrum worked, but I completely failed at making any time to do so.

I have at least one developer who was willing to learn the Scrum Master role as well and had experience in at least 7 prior planning meetings on another project. He was perfectly capable of selecting the backlog for the Sprint, establishing a Sprint goal, and helping to brainstorm out all the tasks. Helping to guide the PM in this case wouldn’t be an issue.

The work required to initiate everything was two simple emails. One to let everyone know I wouldn’t be in for the day and a second to bullet point the high level agenda for the planning meeting that they’d have to arrange and facilitate.

So Friday they pulled off the meeting on short notice and I trust it went fine. Once delegated you have to let go and let your people run things. They may do things differently, they may make some mistakes, but that’s the whole point of learning. And in my case learning that I need to delegate more, not just when I take the day off.

I got in a nice cozy nap with the two cats and rested up over the weekend. Monday actually looks pretty inviting.

I budgeted this year for dual 20″ monitors or one 24″ monitor for each developer. With prices dropping now maybe we can go to a single 30″. Keeping your IDE, a browser, a terminal window, and an email client certainly helps with productivity.

I implement my personal organization system in 37 Signals Backpack. I’ve had a subscription now for about 15 months and its been the best way I can find to maintain David Allen’s GTD method. After a lot of experimentation including trying out other tools such as just tracking everything on index cards, or using Kinkless GTD with Omni Outliner, I kept coming back to Backpack as the best available solution for me. The major bonuses are:

• It’s an online service so I can access it from home on my Macs and from work on my PC, and even on my Treo.
• The core feature for me is a very simple way of adding lists. Just click, type, and return any time you want to add a todo on a page.
• When you need something that has a few steps, ie a project, you just add a new page.
• You can add just about anything to a page including images, files, and notes. I have 115 or so pages now and some of them are just things like notes on how to upgrade cruisecontrol or a list of potential future projects in our pipeline. A nice personal wiki.
• They keep adding features which make it more valuable. This is the real glory of online hosted applications. You keep picking up features with no install/upgrade hassle, it’s why I liked the ASP model all along even when it became associated with the dotcom bust.
• There’s even a client app so you can have a local offline backup using Packrat.

The new feature utilizing movable list items is going to really help out with something that drove me crazy. Today in backpack you can move around items in a list, but you can’t effectively move items between multiple lists unless they are right next to each other. My main context page that lists most of my todos by context area has:

• Inbox
• @Computer
• @Office
• @Agenda
• @Home
• @Home Computer

The idea was dump things in my inbox, then drag them into the appropriate context when I have time to process things. The problem was I generally had to cut and paste the item to move it negating any ease of use. This new feature really solves that problem.

Now I just need the ability to move list items between pages, or the ability to tag individual list items.

(Apologies if this was to GTD geeky.)

I learned a few days ago that a simple information radiator such as a task board can be extremely threatening. Our PM/Scrum Master on a project announced a recent unilateral decision to switch meeting rooms simply to escape the dangerous distractions of a task board. Apparently the team found the task board a more useful way to keeping tabs on progress, but the PM preferred a spreadsheet and didn’t want to allow for any other options on visualizing progress.

The bigger picture is that we’re still fighting a lot of problems with understanding that Scrum is built around the idea of self-organizing teams not command and control PMs. If the team decides on an approach that’s working for them it isn’t up to the Scrum Master to overrule them and then attempt to enforce it via dictating.

Who knew a yellow sticky note was dangerous.