Agile Foundation Sprint
- Jan Kubica
During the Foundation sprint Pricefx and the Customer will review and detail the scope and plan for the project. The parties will conduct a kick-off meeting with the project stakeholders to review the objectives, goals, scope, schedule, and roles. The project team will detail the collection of user stories that will make up the original set of business requirements for the project. During the Foundation sprint the Customer will be introduced to the Pricefx agile methodology and application.
Especially larger customers might have specific procedures or requirements around testing before an application can be used in their production environment. We need to learn this and take this in to account in our timeline.
A second goal of this sprint, is to have an internal gate review on the effort estimations. During the sales cycle the initial estimations have been made, based on the requirements as known at that point in time. At the end of the foundation sprint, much more details are known. The SA should re-estimate ALL user stories, and the PM should re-estimate all non-config time. This new estimation should be compared with the original estimate. If this estimation differs from the initial estimation from the SoW, involve the sales team to look at why there is a difference. Based on the root cause, this should be handled internally or this difference should be reported to the customer by both the project and sales team.
Goal for the sprint:
Kick off meeting; roles in project are clearly defined; customer is trained, and the backlog is refined and detailed.
Actions:
With the customer:
Going through the time planning, resources on customer side and project organization described in SoW
Provide support and work with customer on user story backlog refining and prioritization
Make sure the customer moves the user story status to 'Defined' to ensure they acknowledge the requirement is completely described
Agreeing with customer about the definition of „Done“, „Ready“, „Change request“ and testing flow
Agree with the customer what audience there needs to be for the 'Kick off' part of the meeting (typically a bigger audience) and what the audience is for the foundation workshop part (typically the core team).
Organize training about Agile and JIRA tool including testing procedures; align with customer internal systems
Organize training on Pfx tool - either done by the PM/SA or a kickoff training from the education team
Understand what procedures the customer has or specific testing that is needed (more than unit testing and UAT) before the customer can bring an application live. The Operational Readiness deck can be used for this.
Internally within Pricefx:
Here is what we do in Pricefx. Be inspired but respect the rules and guidelines of your company!
Internal gate review on the user story and project estimate based on the foundation sprint level of detail. If needed report back to the customer
Prepare a Jira Project - important is to tell the customer we need to use our own JIRA system and not the system of the customer to manage the project.
In your Jira project, please make sure to set it up for time estimates which are visible in the active sprint board and backlog.
Fill in the Project Confluence page
Set up the project controlling tool.
Foundation Sprint Checklist:
You have a business understanding of the project.
You know what interfaces are involved and how they look like.
You have detailed User stories
You have past the internal gate review related comparing the new estimates with the estimations from the SoW
You agreed with the customer on the next steps.
You have an agreed data delivery plan
If there are any risks, communicate with CS management and Sales.
Keep CSM in the loop of all communications on this stage.
The customer received training on our agile methodology, about JIRA (and has access there) and about Pfx tool (relevant modules only).
We understand the needed testing procedures on the customer side and anything else that might impact the project timeline