PMO Focus | How to Start (or Restart) a Project by Margo Rabchenuk
Starting a project is exhilarating and daunting, and restarting a project can feel uncomfortable and disorganized. The team has an empty backlog or one filled with work that is no longer needed and a general sense of what needs to be done. In the ideal Agile project, a product owner has filled the backlog with comprehensive stories that contain detailed instructions, designs, architecture, requirements, and acceptance criteria. The team can then easily estimate, assign, plan, and execute. However, in reality the team often has to start from scratch and may not have a product owner available to them. Or, the project may have some fundamental shifts from the initial direction and the work previously defined no longer has value. Here are some techniques that scrum masters and teams can use to help themselves fill that backlog and have a good foundation for starting or restarting a project.
Start out with a short Sprint 0 to take some time before any code is developed or work is done to collect information as a team. Spending time within this Sprint 0 can be critical with the focus on filling the backlog. During this time, teams should have several working sessions to derive some large areas of work that can be filled with individual tasks and stories. Bring in key stakeholders, users, and other subject matter experts to help talk through primary concerns. The Sprint 0 goals would be to have at least 1-2 sprints defined that would set a foundation for the work to be done.
Begin the next sprints with knowns and unknowns by including some research or spike stories in the first two sprints crafted to get some additional context for key areas of the project. By balancing the work within a sprint to cover known tasks as well as requirements gathering, the team can move forward in parallel. During these first few sprints, it will be critical for the scrum master to keep research activities focused and utilize the refinement meetings to help build the backlog.
Avoid siloes of technical knowledge and research by keeping the team together during all research findings reviews and forward planning. If teams are split off into their own areas and do not come back together to present and find consensus as a team, there is a risk of project knowledge becoming dependent on one or more team members. The first few sprints are critical for establishing a team’s working cadence and velocity, and they must have consensus on the work together in order to ensure that the project moves forward in a productive way.
Document the early decisions and direction through a project charter or similar method that can be revisited and updated as the team gains more clarity and works with customers or users. Teams without a product owner can occasionally lose sight of the goal of a project, and keeping the focus on the business value identified at the inception of the project can help recalibrate a team if it starts to veer off in a direction that may compromise the end result. The Agile Manifesto values working software over comprehensive documentation and responding to change over following a plan, which can feel as if the plan and documentation are not necessary. On the contrary, teams can go far down a path to achieve working software that does not meet the customer’s needs, and if those needs are not documented it can keep teams heading down a path that may result in rework and dissatisfaction. Spend time in refinement meetings to ensure that the direction of a feature or product are kept aligned with the stories being crafted for future sprints.
Over the course of a project, the team may find that it needs to recalibrate based on new information, technical challenges, or user feedback. The first value and principle of Agile is the individual and interaction over processes and tools, and scrum masters play a key role in guiding and protecting the team’s morale. In those situations, resetting the project with a Sprint 0 can help team members and stakeholders get back to a revised direction and plan that resets expectations for the execution and helps positively move the team forward.