Before we started

Duration, funding and reputation

The current project team and application have been running for around a year.

It is seen as successful within the organisation and has exceeded its business targets, which are largely around the ability to avoid further increases in call centre volumes whilst providing self-service for customers who prefer to work online.

Funding and delivery have been in in 3 to 4 month blocks.  We generally release every few weeks with something significant.

Stakeholders

We do our own testing with end users and our internal stakeholders are distributed around the country.

There is no one person who has authority to make business decisions, particularly when it comes to cross-divisional sales or pricing impacts. Despite this, we generally don't struggle with roadblocks too much.

Our primary business sponsor is the COO of our division and sits next to us.

Processes and team

From a software engineering point of view the team is mature, with continuous integration, automated unit tests with reasonable coverage, some automated functional tests for acceptance / releases and so on.

The team is very cohesive and positive, with a couple of people swapping between roles quite often (e.g. swap to manage testing after doing requirements or design). To date the developers have been lead by a development lead, who assigns work and makes technical design decisions within the core web space.

We have traditional round-robin daily stand-ups for intra-team communication and to identify roadblocks.

While some previous releases have worked to a scrum-like hearbeat, this has not been the case for a few months.

How work is managed

In short, project work is structured and all other work is ad-hoc.

Work comes into the team in a variety of ways. Some work is dictated by funding scope (e.g. new features promised as deliverables).

Other work is related to running the platform and tends to come in via phone calls and emails to various team members.

Finally there is a long wish list in Jira that holds anything anyone has ever suggested we look at, in terms of ongoing improvements, problems, ideas and so on.