Business idea transformed into todo list and work plan — PwinsDay#2
By: Patryk Janik
Tags: Consulting, Methodology, Zoom, Jira

Communication

Yesss, communication. You can call it even consulting. Everything starts from the basic channel where you first time contacted your customer. It could be an email, social media, private conversation at some real event (ah, those times before COVID), and much more.

Sometimes you get a detailed document, brief, conversation, design as a starting point for whole cooperation. You need to understand the vision of your customer idea if you want to make it a reality. That is why you need to ask questions if you don’t understand some concepts. It will prevent “I did not want this but something different” complaints.

When we were developing PwinsDay app we used emails for daily basis communication with client. If there were more complex problems then we scheduled Google Meet meeting but after some time we switched to Zoom. It let us have a better call quality on a low internet connection.

But this is still a fight. You need to always cut the mustard. That is why transparency in projects is crucial. One call over week/2 weeks for progress demonstration purposes is something that can fastly identify differences in idea interpretation. In the end, it means a happy customer 🙂

Tasks definition

You need someplace for storing all of those requirements. There is a lot of tools available for free/paid like e.g. Trello, YouTrack or Jira. We used Jira because you can extend your team managing capabilities with the built-in features. You can easily add backlog, sprints, kanban board, time tracking, and much more. Such approach is more adaptive and you can manage your tasks while scaling.

If we have a tool ready then we need to know a way to handle requirements efficiently. Normally you divide them into smaller groups to understand the scope size and have the possibility to estimate the project.

With Jira we created a new “next-gen” project and started filling epics. Epics are “big complex tasks” which can be divided into smaller ones. They give you a vision of what is done and what needs to be taken as next. I prefer the approach when you adjust how time-consuming epics are due to your overall project length.

Epics consist of tasks and bugs.

Divide and conquer — divide a big task into smaller one to easier present what needs to be done. Bugs are regression tasks. Something worked and stopped or worked incorrectly. You need to store it somewhere to don’t forget about them.

Epics can be added to Jira feature called “Roadmap”. It will show you if your estimations were right and when the full project will be delivered (approximately). You can also see all tasks and bugs in a backlog to prioritize them by order and assign them to the proper person.

Plan — Methodology

There are multiple ways of managing your team. Probably most common would be agile and scrum. I have seen a lot of different implementation of methodologies in different companies and got to the conclusion that you need to decide what ceremonies work for you or not. Here is a shortlist of ceremonies we used to deliver PwinsDay. You can combine them into your own methodology and add your working routines:

Standups

What

Max 15 min meetings where you speak about

what have you done previously

what you plan to do next

blockers

Why

Being up to date with team work to solve problems (blockers) and share ideas on daily basis.

Frequency

Every day? Or 3 times in a week?

Sprints

What

2 week repetitive period of time where we focus on a predefined task to be accomplished.

Why

Focusing on a small amount of tasks and delivery. Dividing whole product development into small task chunks is more efficient than solving big tasks at once.

Backlog

What

Place where we store a list of tasks where an order is a priority.

Why

We need to have someplace to see what work can be done next.

Refinement meetings

What

Meetings where we talk about business functionalities that need to be done and we add them to a backlog in proper order.

1h long?

Why

a better understanding of task that needs to be done in the future and answering question where we are going

a place for fulfilling backlog

Frequency

1 in a sprint? Or 2?

Sprint planning

What

Meeting where we take previous sprint tasks (if some has left) and tasks from a backlog and create a list of tasks for a given sprint that we estimate to deliver.

1h long with retro?

Why

We need to know the scope of the next sprint work.

Frequency

1 in a sprint (beginning)

Retrospectives

What

Meeting when we talk about

check previous action item list

what went well

what can be improve

create action item list — list of elements that we need to accomplish

1h long with sprint planning (before)?

Why

Iterative way of improving process, development and everything!!!

Frequency

1 in a sprint (begining)

Demos

What

Meetings where we present the outcome of our progress.

1h long?

Why

We need to see if we are doing it in the right way and control our outcomes to prevent misunderstanding and bugs.

Frequency

1 in a sprint (end)

Additional tools

DocuSign — to sign your agreements online,

notion — to store any documents and shared information,

slack — for developers communication,

calendly — for easy calls scheduling (combined with your calendar)

That’s it 🤟

Feel free to share it with others 💪