Enabling Teams to Pivotal Practices

Overview

Our customers consider Pivots to be thought-leaders in lean and agile methodologies, such as user-centered design, working in small balanced team, test-driven development, and paired programming. Some of our customers learn these methods through a “Lab” experience, where a team of Pivots directly enable clients onsite. This presents a unique opportunity for Tracker, because:

1. teams who experience the Lab often need support in the practices when they return home (typically to organizations that use alternative methodologies), and 

2. not every Tracker customer gets the benefit of a Lab experience.

We saw these situations first-hand during our D&F, and we knew that there was an opportunity for New Tracker to be a “light-weight consultant” in an app.

Opportunity #1

Opportunity: Prevent technical knowledge silos, encourage shared context, and ensure that developers know what work to “pick up” throughout the day. Why? Because a team that collaborates delivers more work, faster.

Solution: A “stand-up view” to remind teams to have a conversation every morning and to help them plan an agenda.

Opportunity #2

Opportunity: Prevent technical knowledge silos, encourage shared context, and ensure that developers know what work to “pick up” throughout the day.

Solution: Within the “stand-up view,” allow users to create a track of work and associate cards in the backlog and the pair who will work on it. It also enforces healthy practices by alerting people when two people have been paired too long or are in danger of creating silos.

The first iteration of designs explored the type of content displayed and where the feature would appear (separate page, modal, in-context):

After deciding to move forward with the in-context view (so users could visualize the backlog at the same time), we fleshed out a full flow:

After follow-up interviews with users, we learned that the feature had low discoverability. Additionally, while users add people to tracks, they don’t always associate work. In the next iteration we:

• Added a “pro-tip” to the track tiles to explain the value of associating work

• Added the ability to automatically add the pair to their associated track when they began work on a story

• Made the “filter by track” icon more discoverable (so developers get the full value out of the feature)

After some small improvements, we ended up meeting both our quantitative and qualitative success metrics.

Opportunity #3

Opportunity: Encourage breaking-down work into small, individually-acceptable pieces of work that can be delivered at a predictable, sustainable pace. Why? Because it helps teams build the right thing, with less re-work.

I started this effort by leading two design studios. During the first design studio, we built a shared understanding of what factors make up complexity. During the second design studio, we sketched ideas to help users determine complexity.

Solution: A “complexity calculator” that instructs users on how to estimate work based on complexity, rather than time, and gives tips on how to break down work or when to do a research spike.