From the course: Project Management Foundations

Manage the explore stage

From the course: Project Management Foundations

Manage the explore stage

“

- [Instructor] Agile projects get you to the explore stage quickly. This is where the team starts building and implementing features. At this stage, a lot of collaboration occurs between the business and technical folks. The bulk of the effort and the explore stage is working on the features assigned to the current iteration. The business and technical team members start each day with a short standup meeting, usually 15 minutes. While these meetings occur during all agile stages, they're key during the explore stage. Each person briefs the team on what they completed the day before, what they plan to finish today, and any help they need. If issues come up, you don't resolve them in the daily meeting. Instead, make a note of them, but work on resolving them after the meeting. The people who tackle the issue report on it to the group in the next day's meeting. The only documentation that comes out of the meeting is adding issues to a register to track lessons learned. The team runs these meetings. That doesn't mean you as the project manager have nothing to do. Your main job is to remove obstacles so team members can focus on their work. During the meeting, you track progress on the features planned for this iteration. If features are behind schedule, you need to find out why and help get things back on track. If issues are to blame, add them and their solutions to the issue log. Speaking of issues, keep an eye on any that aren't getting resolved and offer to help. As with any meeting, if it starts to go off track, you can jump in to help refocus the team's attention. After the meetings, notify stakeholders of progress. Here's a key concept With the agile approach. You stop working on features when the iteration is scheduled to end, even if the features aren't done. For example, if your explore stage is four weeks, you stop at four weeks. If features are incomplete, you put the incomplete work into the backlog to address in a future iteration. On the other hand, if the team cranks out the iteration features faster than they estimated, you can start working on another feature from the backlog to fill in the rest of the time. The explore stage is mostly about building and implementing features, with short daily meetings to help keep things on track. For practice, create a checklist for things you as project manager should watch for during the daily standup meetings.

Contents