Being in the software development for over 10 years, started working in a software service industry in the first half of my career then moving to a product development, I find myself it is a cultural change or should I say I reinvented myself many times, getting a better process or discipline on delivering Quality Software on time and budget.
I do think every product development has to be Agile, wether you are part of the product management or product development. You would agree, when you don’t know who is your next customer or you don’t know your next customer want. There is so much goes in a product development at least for simplicity we can say product evolves with (a) tracking the market/customer needs and (b) following Technology evolution
Understanding the nature of the business, and understanding the engineers and managers who involve in getting the product out, and the emotions that goes along during the changes happens that are unplanned and You as a product owner helping everyone to cope up to adopt the changes. it is a challenge and it doesn’t happen easily if you don’t have the right team. The Right team is not just a well qualified and skilled people, but it needs more than that, you will also agree you need a team full of self-responsible individuals who respects professional ethics and trust between the team members.
Having tried a simple excel sheet to MS Project and writing several documents, I always wanted to keep things simple and by simple I mean, the process should evolve to meet our needs and not the other way around.
I always wanted to just use one single tool to communicate and coordinate and collaborate with all my team members, including product management, support and development. Common to all of us here is Outlook 2007, so I could not think of better tool to implement SCRUM and make it more effective, I wanted the information to reach to the team members instead they have to go for it to know what is changed or make an update.
Also I instituted the daily 5 minutes Stand up meeting – each will get about 5 minutes to state what they are going to work on today and if they need help from anyone and a weekly meeting to do recap of how it went and the plan for the next week. This really brings everyone a greater visibility of the overall picture and also makes everyone feel they are part of a team.
How it Works
This is a solution, you can think of it like, using as it is, SharePoint 2007 as a back end and Outlook 2007 as a front end for all your cross functional team (sales/marketing/development/support) without writing any custom code.
As I started working SharePoint Server to integrate the reports Reporting Services, I started to explore and discovered the simple project tasks web part, and the “Connect to the Outlook” (you will need outlook 2007), RSS Feed and Alert Me.
The important thing here to note is this integration with Outlook and ability to add RSS Feeds in Outlook and Alert Me feature.
By setting up the Bucket lists as a RSS Feed in your outlook, so any time, when a new item is added in the bucket lists, you will get a notification and for example, the Sales or Marketing or anyone who gets an idea or finds a need for your product, they can simply post a new item to the bucket lists using their Outlook, without having to open the browser or searching for a link where to post. As soon as you (Product Owner) get a notification by setting the “Alert Me”, then you can analyze add minimum/required information.
When you assemble a Sprint/Project Tasks, developers will get an email notification as and when they get assigned to a task. And the developers on the other hand can configure the Sprint/Project Tasks in their Outlook using “Connect to Outlook”, so they don’t have to open the browser again to update the status or get visibility of the overall status
PROJECT Backlog/Bucket Lists
I customized the SharePoint List as a Bucket Lists as a template, so I can capture all the necessary details, as you can see below:
Project Tasks as SPRINT
This Projects Tasks Web Part, I use it as a sprint, will show only the active tasks that are being worked
Connect to Outlook, View RSS Feed and Alert Me
