A New Product in a Week – Day Two

We enter day two of our challenge to create a new product in a week (read more about the challenge here). Yesterday featured much planning and ground work assessing the feasibility of options we have available. Today is about getting into the groove and pushing ahead with the tasks we designed and assigned yesterday.

Adam C (Architect & Project Lead):
Early start for me to try to get ahead of the curve before the rest of the team comes online. One of the things that’s come out of this challenge is that it’s highlighted the benefits of IAM Cloud’s 1-week sprint development model. I definitely think it makes us a lot more responsive at dealing with sudden changes without requiring us to hit crisis mode. The team have taken this challenge in their stride.

Leon M (Commercial Lead & Project Co-conspirator):
Haha, yeah we pretty much just dropped this challenge like a bomb on our team too. They’ve risen to it though.

Adam C
Yeah they have, it’s been good. The only down-side so far that’s been noticeable is we lost some time with the team getting up to speed with unfamiliar projects. It might be good to factor monthly knowledge transfer days where people can get into projects they don’t work on day to day so when we do want to have a big push on something there is less time with knowledge transfer.

Leon M
Good idea. I’ll get it in the diary 😉

Adam C
Ok, bit more planning out the way and the team up to speed. Was actually a really quick meeting because most the work was already laid out from yesterday however it did give us the opportunity to address a few areas of concern and redistribute some work with some over allocated resources. We have reduced the scope of MVP slightly and put some things to backlog however it does not affect the outcome we are looking for. Ultimately the ability to do delta syncs will come soon after as there is too much work to have it done within the current timeframe.

Leon M:
What’s the opposite of scope creep? Scope shrinkage? Scope squeeze? Scope shrivel?

Adam C:
😛 Finished?

Leon M:
Scope abbreviation. Winner.

Adam C:
So anywaaaay… Lewis has been working through the existing steps of an onboarding. We now have all the API calls relevant to the onboarding documented. Also a list of API endpoints that need implementing where the Portal works directly with SQL instead of API (some of that technical debt I mentioned).

Leon M:
Our portal is the worst.

Adam C:
Yes it is. The new one isn’t though. It’s f-ing sweet.

Leon M:
Some people dream of being astronauts. I dream of the day our new portal goes live. So what’s next?

Adam C:
Alex has successfully upgraded our Desktop client to .netcore and has started on adding the API end-points to our platform that Lewis found were missing. What’s really impressed me so far is the autonomy the team has had. My involvement has been a lot less than I imagined, which is great. Would have been a different story years ago where I had to have a hand in every pie. Feel like I’m finally able to step away knowing everyone’s got it covered.

Leon M:
That’s a massive win. Not planning an early retirement I hope just yet though? 😉