Case Study: Reducing Waste By Utilising Agile

When you’re a start up, it’s of the utmost importance that you are making the most of all your resources.

It is especially important when you have the business owner working as the principle consultant managing a team of freelance engineers spanning 3 continents to maintain and develop a cloud platform serving several customers within the fintech industry.

THE PROBLEM

Due to the nature of working across several different time zones there seem to be significant issues with projects and work moving forward quickly, and work not getting done by deadline. Upon analysis of the workflows it was clear that too much onus was put upon communication via email and the sharing of key technical documentation and knowledge share was lacking  - this was creating significant time wastage in completion of  tasks hindering progress and running over deadlines.

Communications on email meant that narratives that were key to the project were getting lost, if a member of the team forgot to CC in the correct engineer this was stalling the task completion, it just wasn’t the appropriate channel to communicate highly technical and complex projects effectively.

Overall communication within the business between the parties was severely lacking causing tension, misunderstanding, misdirected work none of which was offering value to the end customer and creating a resource waste within a already highly stretched business.
The business leader had a reluctance to do anything out of the ordinary or change the format at first, therefore it was key that small incremental step changes were the way forward in improving the communications and the development of projects.

THE OBJECTIVE

The objective was to ensure that projects were finished on time and that the business owner was getting all the “bang for his buck” in terms of the full utilisation of the engineers on work that was adding value to the customer.

THE SOLUTION


STAND UP MEETINGS

The first step change was a scheduled weekly stand up meeting - A principle of Agile usually to communicate on a face to face basis.  That was conducted via Skype and included a screenshare, allowing the team to review technical documents as we discussed our work for the next week (as well as review what we had done the week before). This highlighted very quickly the dependencies between the engineers but for the first time gave them the opportunity to talk to each other directly rather than via email. This began an understanding of the notion of the “internal customer” within the team, highlighting the impact of the dependencies between them.

We held a strict agenda for the meetings, keeping them to 30 mins (as we were doing a weekly as opposed to a daily stand up meeting) we covered the following:

- What had happened the week before

- What was to happen the week commencing

- What was impeding progress

- What the customer was expecting to see happen in the near future

- AOB

After 6 weeks of successful weekly stand up meetings and a suggestion of more cohesion within the team and the way they worked, it was now time to push forward with better organisational processes - a proper project management tool was required.

JIRA KANBAN IMPLEMENTATION

It was essential to move away from project management via emails for complex projects, a move towards a Kanban style project management software system was required.

As a team we scoped out the requirements of implementing a Kanban system which would then be split down into tickets, we started with some basic swimlanes:

- To Do 
- In progress
- In testing 
- Completed

Tickets were only closed when 2 weeks had passed to ensure that the task was fully completed and did not require further rework.

Tickets were created by the Principal - he was having the direct conversations with the customer and was able to collaborate with them in order to set the tickets. In this vain we did not use agile methods like sprints, scrum etc, we kept to the the more traditional method method of adding tickets to a simple "to do" list.

As we had selected JIRA software for our Kanban we were able to take advantage of highly configurable ticket fields, we configured the tickets to cover the following information (although most of the ticket fields are standard in JIRA):

- Area of engineering (i.e. network, system, software)
- Individual who the ticket is assigned to
- Priority status 
- Time taken (this was good to track the time of the freelance engineers)

After implementation, we rolled out the Kanban board via Skype meeting with training to all engineers on how to use it with the internal champion responsible for collecting their feedback and making any configuration changes.

After a few weeks of implementation we decided to change the format of our stand up meetings from individuals to “walking the board” format which requires review of each ticket in the board currently in progress and raising the priority of tickets that were required for the week commencing. This made the stand up meetings very focussed on the work as opposed to the individuals 


THE RESULT 

Better Communication - communication is key in good project management. It is often in the case of the modern workplace that not all people involved in a project will be in a single place at any one time. In these instances it is key to have a tool where people can see the last action on a particular task in order to progress that task in the correct way.

Centralised area where everyone could see the process of each ticket that was available to the whole team - in complex projects, knowledge share is just as important as communication and a centralised repository of technical documentation and narratives to how tasks are progressing is also invaluable. Also the Principal had access to a snapshot of each of the tasks and the project development as a whole.

Reduction of waste in terms of:

Defects - Missed deadlines, incomplete services

Overproduction - Misuse of emails or redoing work that another engineer had completed

Waiting - Engineers waiting for information from each other, or from the business leader

Non utilized talent - Engineers paid on a day rate were sifting through emails and chasing documentation, rather than spending their time working on the customer systems

Transportation - Sending or resending of emails was reduced to zero.