It was great that we had our first larger sprint yesterday! Thanks to everybody who joined and worked on a myriad of things (we had 81 updates in our monitoring feed)! So that's really great. However, it is also the first time we open up the sprints to people that are new to our way of working, and only the second time we've been using the tasks for this purpose.
So the question is: how did it go? What do people think? Would be great to hear from everyone. We don't consider this the final version and structure of doing sprints, but instead a first try-out to see what works and what doesn't.
My personal reflections:
- It was nice to see everybody in the call before we started -- we haven't always done that but I think we should
- Keeping the call open to quickly check in with people was useful -- but at the same time it feels like a lot of swapping between call, the chat in the call, the notifications in the system, and the updates of the tasks! So it may be worth looking into streamlining this (perhaps the chat function in the site resolves this)
- For people that are new, I think it's easy to get lost... and some things are a bit confusing. The tasks didn't always have all the instructions, and there is some duplication. I want to work on better structuring things and also figuring out how to deal with "upload publication/data viz ABC" as a task... I think we can somehow change that up a bit to be clearer.
- Another thought that comes to mind is the idea to try and identify user types (we've done it before, e.g. a Data Miner, or a Librarian). We can set up some sort of a decision tree system, in which new users click on a user type, and then (where relevant) select another parameter (e.g. "Do you want to work on YOUR city on join EXISTING city data efforts?"). Based on this, we can then present them with JUST the right info (list of relevant tasks or instructions).
Anyhow, those are a few thoughts. If anyone else has any thoughts, please do share -- we're here to learn and improve!
