I’ve just returned back from my vacation. In fact, my flight has just landed, and I am writing this post from the plane ✈️. So instead of skipping this week, I thought of posting the following query to gather some wisdom from the community.
Share one thing that you’ve changed within your organization that made your team meaningfully more effective/productive
This could be anything from a small change to the process to how you approach meetings to a sweet new template everyone loves. Use the comments section to share one thing that comes to mind. You can also upvote your favourite ideas — this should take no more than a couple of minutes. Looking forward to your response.
Introduced Azure Delivery Plans to plan releases. It provides the team with full visibilty to work items in the sprint with an integrated view of the releases and the product roadmap. This allows the team to be proactive if minor adjustments are required for an upcoming release.
I do not use any plugins. Created a roadmap using existing ADO functionality
1. A separate team was created for Product Management in ADO. Roadmap items are maintained in the product backlog at the epic level.
2. Connected epic items to the work items using a predecessor relationship (this is a hack, when using delivery plans, you can visually see the connection between the roadmap items and work items in the development backlog)
3. Used Azure Delivery Plans to create an integrated view across multiple teams e.g , Product Management team, dev team 1, dev team 2 etc.
A significant portion of most of POs and SMs time was consumed in the laborious task of creating numerous PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets, which are crucial but manual and extremely time consuming.
I took the challenge to automate all the reports. There was a lot of resistance and pushbacks but had the support of 1 lead so carried on. I began by streamlining the Jira workflows across all nine projects. Got the team to Ingest the Jira data into our data warehouse. Used this data to get the BI team build fancy dashboards for all manual reports. However, a further obstacle arose regarding how executives would comprehend the detailed Jira task summaries. To overcome this, I employed Vertex AI's language summarizer (not as classy as ChatGPT but close), collaborating with the RPI team to fine-tune the machine learning models. With this solution in place, we now enjoy concise and meaningful updates summarized in a single line(where required), facilitating a clear understanding of the weekly, fortnightly, and monthly reports. All automated!
Automation is a mindset. I consistently drive the automation agenda within my team and value every small step towards achieving it.
- Introduced templates in support project to standardized the response from the team . Designing the quality measure criteria's for the support project.
- Optimized the meetings to effectively use the project teams efforts.
May 29, 2023·edited May 30, 2023Liked by Vibhor Chandel
To promote the "Outcomes" over "Output" mindset , we have started measuring how much effort of our Sprint is on "work" that will get deployed to production in the current spint . We then try to make sure that we have a decent percentage of our sprint getting deployed to production.
Introduced Azure Delivery Plans to plan releases. It provides the team with full visibilty to work items in the sprint with an integrated view of the releases and the product roadmap. This allows the team to be proactive if minor adjustments are required for an upcoming release.
Great idea Abigail. Thanks for sharing.
but how you added Product Roadmap in Azure Devops there is no direct plugin option for Roadmap in ADO @abigail Field
I do not use any plugins. Created a roadmap using existing ADO functionality
1. A separate team was created for Product Management in ADO. Roadmap items are maintained in the product backlog at the epic level.
2. Connected epic items to the work items using a predecessor relationship (this is a hack, when using delivery plans, you can visually see the connection between the roadmap items and work items in the development backlog)
3. Used Azure Delivery Plans to create an integrated view across multiple teams e.g , Product Management team, dev team 1, dev team 2 etc.
I have started focusing on completing work rather than starting by using kanban board from right side. This gives us early wins to the team.
A significant portion of most of POs and SMs time was consumed in the laborious task of creating numerous PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets, which are crucial but manual and extremely time consuming.
I took the challenge to automate all the reports. There was a lot of resistance and pushbacks but had the support of 1 lead so carried on. I began by streamlining the Jira workflows across all nine projects. Got the team to Ingest the Jira data into our data warehouse. Used this data to get the BI team build fancy dashboards for all manual reports. However, a further obstacle arose regarding how executives would comprehend the detailed Jira task summaries. To overcome this, I employed Vertex AI's language summarizer (not as classy as ChatGPT but close), collaborating with the RPI team to fine-tune the machine learning models. With this solution in place, we now enjoy concise and meaningful updates summarized in a single line(where required), facilitating a clear understanding of the weekly, fortnightly, and monthly reports. All automated!
Automation is a mindset. I consistently drive the automation agenda within my team and value every small step towards achieving it.
- Introduced templates in support project to standardized the response from the team . Designing the quality measure criteria's for the support project.
- Optimized the meetings to effectively use the project teams efforts.
To promote the "Outcomes" over "Output" mindset , we have started measuring how much effort of our Sprint is on "work" that will get deployed to production in the current spint . We then try to make sure that we have a decent percentage of our sprint getting deployed to production.