Bringing Agile to Higher Ed Without Scaring Anyone

Working on the Web in higher education has its unique challenges. Regardless of your team setup, getting client feedback at each stage of a project is inefficient; too much time passes between feedback and design next steps. This type of workflow increases the possibility of mistakes and false expectations of deadlines. Nick will talk about creating an agile workflow in your environment to transform clients into partners on a project. This shift in relationship can have a major impact on the speed, accuracy, and level of work produced. Every team is different and introducing agile practices can lead to resistance. Nick will explore techniques to bring an agile workflow to a team for faster feedback loops and to produce better work.

https://github.com/nickdenardis/agile-workflow
http://mi.highedweb.org/conference-schedule/bringing-agile-to-higher-ed-without-scaring-anyone/

Transcript

1. AGILE WORKFLOW
   BRINGING AGILE TO HIGHER ED WITHOUT SCARING ANYONE
   /
   Nick DeNardis @nickdenardis
   

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2. NICK DENARDIS
   Perpetual minimalist. User experience crafter. Speaker. Realist.
   Web Director at . Library Scientist. Technical
   Director for . Organizer for and
   . teacher.
   @waynestate
   @TEDxDetroit @hewebMI
   @RefreshDetroit @GDIdet
   

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3. AND... NOT A TRAINED AGILIST
   But I am a practitioner
   

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4. ONCE UPON A TIME...
   I gave four people six months to reconstruct from
   the ground up
   our website
   42 individual sites, 4,000+ pages, 250 templates, countless
   stakeholders
   

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5. THEY DID IT!
   And thus begins our journey...
   

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6. HIGHERED IS BUILT ON PROCESSES
   Let's embrace that
   

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7. CONTEXT
   

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8. THIS TALK IS ABOUT TEAMS
   2-10 people, local preferred
   

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9. MY TEAM != YOUR TEAM
   Not a step by step guide
   

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10. THIS TALK IS ABOUT WEB SOFTWARE
    Anything else you take away from it is a bonus
    

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11. "AGENCY" WITH "CLIENTS"
    Managing a product could be it's own talk
    

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12. AND YOU..
    Using any agile practices?
    Who is using traditional waterfall?
    Who oversees a team?
    Who is on a team?
    Who is the whole team?
    

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13. agile, not Agile
    Agile is short for "agility"
    

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14. AGILE MANIFESTO
    Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
    Working software over comprehensive documentation
    Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
    Responding to change over following a plan
    

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15. “To heal the divide between
    business and development”
    ~ Kent Beck
    

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16. IMPROVE
    No process or person is perfect
    

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17. WHAT'S WRONG WITH WATERFALL?
    Semantic Diffusion
    The original ideas, as they get passed from person to person get
    more diffused (more and more fuzzy).
    

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19. DO WE HAVE TO GO ALL IN?
    Nope.
    But all team buy-in is important
    Everyone must be willing to try ideas for some time before
    dismissing them.
    

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20. THE STARTING POINT
    

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21. RETROSPECTIVES
    Start here if you do anything at all
    Once a week, or every other week
    It's about improving slowly over time
    

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22. FOUR QUESTIONS
    1. What went well?
    2. What didn’t go so well?
    3. What have I learned?
    4. What still puzzles me?
    

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23. REPEAT.
    

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24. INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS
    Projects rarely fail because of technology
    Communication (or lack of it) is the root cause of disaster
    projects
    

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25. CLIENT CONTACT
    Project Manager? Designer? Developer? Writer? ...
    All of them.
    

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26. CUSTOMER COLLABORATION
    

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27. INITIAL EXPECTATIONS
    Client: This agency is going to make me more money
    Agency: This client is going to pay the bills
    

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28. COLLABORATION VS COOPERATION
    Introduce feedback loops as early as as often as possible.
    

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29. COOPERATION
    Going along with someone else's idea, they have already figured
    it out and you're along for the ride.
    

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30. COLLABORATION
    Build something together, something new happens.
    Working then handing off and pipelining means there isn’t a
    collective knowledge unless you document it
    

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31. Dr. Alistair Cockburn, 2002
    

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32. COLLABORATIVE DESIGN
    Define minimum requirements and constraints
    15 mins - Break out individually and create wireframe
    sketches
    5 mins/person - Individual presentation of wireframe to the
    group
    Group critique on individual’s wireframe with feedback
    focused on clarifying the presenter’s design
    15 mins - Break out individually for iteration on their own most
    well-received wireframe
    5 mins/person - Presentation/group critique
    30 mins - Sketch a single solution based on wireframes and
    feedback
    At the end (2 hours) a single wireframe built by the group is
    complete
    

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36. RESPONDING TO CHANGE
    

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37. SUCCESS
    What does it look like?
    

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38. PLANNING UP FRONT
    success == according to plan
    

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39. ADAPTIVE PLANNING
    Plan and execute many times on a project
    (every sprint)
    

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40. POINT NORTH
    http://pointnorth.io/
    

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41. ALIGN AND GUIDE YOUR PROJECT
    North is a set of standards and best practices for developing
    modern web based properties. Included are standards and best
    practices for all aspects of a project, from kick off through
    development. North encourages an agile, content-first, approach
    to product development and a mobile-first, in-browser, system
    based approach to design and development.
    

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43. WORKING SOFTWARE
    

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44. RELEASES, SPRINTS, ITERATIONS
    Pick a cycle and stick to it
    If it isn't in the cycle, it isn't important
    

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47. WALKING SKELETON
    Tiny implementation that performs end-to-end function.
    

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49. THIN VERTICAL SLICE
    Layer of the implementation that spans every component.
    

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51. created by Daniel Kummer
    efficient branching using git­flow by Vincent Driessen
    translations: English ­ Castellano ­ Brazilian Portugues ­ 简
    体中文
    (Simplified Chinese) ­
    日本語 ­ Türkçe ­ 한국어(Korean) ­ Français ­
    Italiano
    Fork
    m
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    GitHub
    Tweet 365
    About
    git­flow are a set of git extensions to provide high­level repository
    operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model. more
    ★ ★ ★
    git-flow
    cheatsheet
    

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52. CONTINIOUS INTEGRATION/DEPLOYMENT
    

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53. NO ESTIMATES, ONLY BUDGETS
    Basecamp just posted a good article that sums it up.
    Drive development with budgets not estimates
    

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55. XP/PAIRING/SWARMING
    

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56. WHY WASTE THE TIME OF MULTIPLE PEOPLE
    ON A SINGLE TASK?
    

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57. INCLUDE THE CLIENT?
    As often as possible.
    

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58. HAVE YOUR CLIENTS WRITE/SIGN OFF ON
    ACCEPTANCE TESTS
    WAT?!?
    

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59. ACCEPTANCE TESTS
    A php framework for testing your business expectations.
    Behat
    

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65. RECAP
    agile, not Agile
    Retrospectives
    Customer collaboration
    Working software every release
    Defined release schedule
    Budgets, not estimates
    Pairing/swarming
    

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66. MY HOPE
    There is always room for improvement in your process.
    

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67. RESOURCES
    Agile Manifesto
    Point North
    Drive development with budgets not estimates
    Git Flow Cheatsheet
    Codeship.io - Continious integration and deployment.
    Target Process
    Behat - Behavior driven development
    This talk on GitHub
    Follow me on Twitter
    

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68. THE END
    BY NICK DENARDIS / @NICKDENARDIS
    https://github.com/nickdenardis/agile-workflow
    

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