Plannings on Jira: Stendrome
Jira is the management software that I have been using for the last two years and on which I did a self-training, in order to be able to adapt it and provide the most coherent tools with the needs and the constraints that came with my teams.
This training allowed me to reach all the objectives I was aiming for my team on jira, knowing the site allowed me to implement tools in adequacy with the knowledge of project management acquired during my course, while allowing me to be flexible enough to integrate new production processes in the future.
The most useful tool to have a quick overview of the production process of Stendrome is our roadmap.
During pre-production the tool was limited to categorizing the different research fields on the project, being in constant brainstorming and working with a small and autonomous team.
The management work consisted in framing the team via the cards, operating as a time master. My role was to make sure that each ideation or feasibility test did not push us into feature creep.
Since production time was when the team needed a clear framework in which to operate, it was obvious that a roadmap in the form of a Gantt chart was going to be needed to illustrate production.
We decided to make the game in a linear fashion with respect to the user story in order to refine the experience and ensure that we could meet the deadlines on a shorter first room. In short, that the team was well aligned with the process. The production time was determined by estimating the percentage of each pole on each room, which I then calculated based on our class hours.
I then decided to allocate 20% of our time before the "gold version" to slack time, distributed proportionally to the time of each room to limit the delays and keep a realistic scope for a graduation project. In addition to that, we had "buffer" periods during which we agreed on overtime if necessary.
The board was the part of the software the team needed to be the most comfortable with, that's why I refined it to suit our needs on this project. The goal was to provide a usefull tool without ampering on the productivity of the team and limit friction.
First of all I used an Agile method the team is comfortable with, Kanban, a lean manufacturing method perfect for autonomous teams.
I setted up the workflow in adequacy with our pipeline and agreed upon methods of production wich leaded to 6 columns, although the 6th one was more "administrativ" related.
Finally the cards needed to contain only the essential informations used to coordinate the team and give a status report at first glance. This was done in order for the team to spend as little time as possible on the board. I also integrated automation to enhance this process.
The end result strikes a good balance between productivity, flexibility and team satisfaction.
In addition to all that, you can see here different things that I briefly mentioned were used on the board. Mainly the visual workflow given by jira that I adapted a little to better suit our process visualy, with some "cleaning" automation used on top of that.
And our automation list used to speed up the card filling process, it is using the description of the task so that you can quickly wright what you're working on to fill the card in, causing less friction.
Finally I integrated a few key links so that the team doesn't have to search for them, a time saver.
