For the last two or three weeks, it has been really busy with freshers’ week and week one. As a result, a number of queries and problems have come in, adding to my workload from the iteration I planned at the beginning of week one (see my previous blog post for more information on iteration planning).
As scary as this sounds, with Agile it becomes a lot less scary. The key to staying sane is prioritisation! OK, so that sounds like a fairly obvious statement, but how often do you take a few minutes out of your day to look at your list of tasks and consider which ones are the most important? Using user stories has meant that my ‘planned’ work has already been prioritised, based on business value, ideal hours and common sense. So what do I do when extra work comes in?
The most important thing to remember is that one of the fundamental principles of Agile is ‘responding to change over following a plan’, so if something more important comes in, dropping a user story off the bottom of this current iteration is not the end of the world.
The first thing I do is consider how long the task is going to take me. If it is a task that is likely to take me less than an hour, I will slip it in during that day as my ideal hours for each day is 5, yet I actually work 7 hours a day. Those extra two hours per day are there for this exact reason, as well as responding to emails, answering the phone, having a cup of tea etc.
However, if I anticipate the the user story will take over an hour, I will write a user story for it, giving it a business value and ideal hours. From that I will then work out it’s priority compared to other user stories in my iteration and slip it into the pile at the appropriate place. I also add it to my iteration plan on the whiteboard by my desk so that I can easily check what I’ve got to do and what needs to be done next. I can then give the ‘customer’ a fairly accurate estimate on when the task will be completed.
Sounds great in practice, but does it work? The answer to that is an emphatic YES! During my last iteration (the two weeks before week one, encompassing freshers week) a lot of last minute Moodle related requests came in, which meant I had to drop a couple of user stories off the bottom of the iteration. My velocity, the actual amount of hours I was able to dedicate to the user stories, was less than I had anticipated due to extra meetings and more emails than normal so that also affected how much I got done. However, everything that NEEDED to be done was not only completed by the required time but actually with plenty of time to spare, and I am confident in saying that the reason for that is using Agile to plan my working weeks.
