Warning: don’t misinterpret scrum for agile as a whole :) Around a year ago I wrote a yearly retrospect on how the workflow at SkuVault is organized, and how we set up our jira boards to work in sprints. sprints and their goals There was no Kanban backlog at the moment, and we used Scrum board as an improvized scrumban tool: we had the sprints, which were treated as folders to fit tickets in some time period. Classical sprints were not suitable for our workflow, I mentioned the reasons in Year Retrospective @ SkuVault. So that sprint-folder system was great, visible and allowed us to predict. ...

Jira is flexible, yet complex tool in some cases :) - In order to make the fields (inline as well) editable, when the ticket is closed, go to Workflow -> Select 'Closed' status -> Click Properties - There would be flags with bool values: we need jira.issue.editable -  - In case you see jira.issue.editable is false - either change that to true or delete the property key with prev. value. - Don't forget to publish the updated workflow.

This post is available in Russian. *And do it without the CEO flying all the way down to your city :) * Let me share a bit of an experience from past 6 months :) We wanted to open a branch in Russia (parent company is in US). Our case is a bit unique: our CEO wasn’t able to visit Russia, so we had to verify and send the list of docs back’n’forth between two continents. ...

In order for the distrubited teams to work, you got to have a clear flow, a set of general rules, that will fence the process and allow people to collaborate effectively around the globe. If everything is set up correctly, you are able to create amazing products with global professionals, and cover customer support 20+ hours a day. Communication What do you miss most when working outside of the office? Procrastination! ...

So it happened - I managed to gather 2 people for PM & BA meetup (without any PR xD). After visiting Vienna, I desperately wanted a platform to share knowledge or / and mock each other on PM & BA failures. So I created one: Ufa Project Management & Business Analysis Group Initial meeting consisted of Me, Nur (from modulbank.ru - online bank for small businesses) and Oleg (from smena.io - various crms / solutions for partners). Both work as analysts at cool and interesting teams. ...

Recently my colleague, Tim, decided to try out Planning Poker, to have better estimations. Planning is essential, and scrum already offers a framework of how to deal with planning. But over the course of my work and experience with scrum techniques, team usually shapes Previous experience showed that daily scrum meetings are merely pointless. Direct communication / skype / IM is much more efficient. Especially in distributes teams. And following each and every ritual from scrum routine is time and efficiency consuming during the first iterations, since agile methodologies need a good deal of instructions. Usually, after some time teams shape up scrum as they want, and it just works, so from my experience it’s not essential to follow scrum by the book (Agile Estimating and Planning book by Mike Cohn, written 10 years ago). Here are additional thoughts on why our transatlantic distributed team doesn’t fully fit into planning classic scrum and it’s rituals: ...

Last year guys from SkuVault offered me an amazing opportunity to help the company manage a growing development team, create organized schedule, establish workflow that reflects the company goals . For those who don’t know - SkuVault is a Warehouse Management System (WMS). Like a swiss army knife, SkuVault manages and syncs your inventory across e-Commerce platforms, POS, Logistics and Warehouses, providing accurate quantities in order to prevent out of stocks. Headquartered in Louisville, KY - SkuVault helps to manage the inventory for hundreds of clients all across the globe. ...

I’ve recently been to Vienna, and visited local Austrian Startups Stammtisch. It went by the number #31, so quite a consistent event going on for more than a year now. The event took place in Sektor5 co-working space (which I have to recommend, because it’s a really cool place with only eur 18 per day! You can feel the international vibe and all that kinds of stuff). Sektor 5 got a cool terrace :) ...

It’s all about the process I might be a captain obvious here, but supporting a process for an analyst / pm is a more important, than micromanaging tasks amongst developer pool. When a new team member steps in, who’s responsibility is to manage development processes, she needs to find how to make business processes inside a company better. Business processes are evaluated from various points of view, but in a nutshell, aside from developer professionalism, she needs to make sure there’s no room for slowdowns and uncertanties when product passes different stages across different teams. Whether there are delays in communication, or delays of resources for the project, or sick-days, - there should be a correct process to tackle such cases, in order to minimize negative outcome. ...

While working on Storia.me iPhone app, we’ve eventually came up to the three-week sprints. Empirically, they proved themselves to make product high quality and provided time to get moderate functionality chunks done. Two notes here: - First of all - this is does not include time for appStore approval. That's additional week. So a release cycle is 1 month. - Second, we came to three-week sprints after we released MVP. Preparing the app for MVP was quite a kerfuffle, but we managed to finish needed bits in 2 months. Don't forget to have some rest and go for a holiday after that :) ...