More Shared Knowledge on Projects

• Include more people in code reviews even if they’re not actively picking up development tasks – this shares out knowledge of the changes and gets another set of eyes that can ask good questions
• Break team silos, share knowledge
• Do Team PR’s for big PR’s
  • Ideally break work into small pieces though
• Do team share of projects for tech projects, share knowledge
• Team Collab!

Metrics/Monitoring/Data

• Implement monitoring and error visibility to make it easier to debug problems down the road.
• Data driven approach whenever we can to illustrate impact. This can be something we start collection at the beginning and continue through out the project.
• implement monitoring & debugging for every milestone, every deliverable

Testing & Tech Debt

• Automated testing early in the process
• Test Plan/Test Matrix up-front
• Fix broken windows along the way
  • broker time for tech debt
  • broker time for related bugs in the backlog

Status Update/Communication

• Constant, detailed, concise status updates in channel – this is particularly helpful when rolling new people on because you can say “please go back and read the content of the channel for the past week”
• Frequent check-ins/deliverables
• Customers/Users to consult with along the way
• highlight risks early and often
  • Clear Communication of Risks, Early & Often
• Roll out plans
• Disorganization from not knowing what work streams are in progress and who is working on what tasks
• Clear Status Updates in Channel
  • Nice for on-boarding new folks
• clear comms, high vis

Kickoff & Milestones

• Clear Milestones
  • What is the smallest thing we can deliver to our customers/partners so they can validate our approach?
• Clear outline of project goals and milestones, this helps us fall back on the main objective when things get unorganized
• Kick Off!
  • Celebration, where we’re going
  • Outline what we want to build
  • Why we’re doing it
  • Is how that important?
  • What you’re going to do is not that important
• 🎉 Continue celebrating small wins!
• You need time devoted to design, review, write tech specs
• You need time for fast-follow work that you uncover along the way
• Clear Project Goals & Milestones
  • when things get disorganized, what to do

Project Task Tracking Doc

• Keeping a separate project doc that tracks tasks and stories. It can be a bit of a pain to manage and sometimes is a couple days out of date, but I’ve found it very helpful in keeping alignment on the work left to do for a project
• Take into accounts bugs and broken windows you can fix along the way
• Don’t be too fine grained on certain tasks
  • Things can be rough if clear. You don’t need a page long ticket for a one line change Tech Specs / RFCs
• Pre-planning for any project should begin much before the actual work
  • Getting familiar with code base
  • Setting up environment
  • etc etc
• Tech specs or brain storming sessions that involve the entire team in the design process.
• Create a detailed design doc to iron out the implementation details
  • no matter how small the feature/project is
  • take them through the appropriate design reviews
• RFCs
  • Full RFC overview right before the official kick-off.
  • could be an engineering focused project where we comb through assumptions and highlight any risks.
  • This might also help with setting original expectations on delivery date

Swarming

• Full Team Swarming has value
• Reduce having single developers on projects
• Attempting to breakdown work or introduce parallelism for projects that were not initially designed that way can cause problems.
• Figure out in the design phase what work that can be done in parallel (planning for multiple developers)