Luckily this past quarter our product release was in the beginning of December and there was no holiday drag on that release, but the next release started off in the holiday season and there were definitely days and even full weeks with only 40% of the teams working on sprint commitments. That is a serious drain on team productivity, especially when an entire discipline may be absent from a team, no PO, or no QA. Luckily the remainder of the quarterly release the vacations and time away and distractions were not as great.
This same holiday season also impacts initiatives that require people to show up voluntarily, like the Quality Center of Excellence that I was heading. While teams were struggling to keep the lights on some days and weeks during this time, I knew it would be hard to get attention and get folks to voluntarily show up. I planned for this by having only one meeting between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This way I hoped that asking for 1 hour of time for a single meeting instead of two meetings would help with attendance. I was ready to invest the time for two, but felt others might not and I didn't want to discourage myself by having a low attendance meeting.
I also wanted to make sure that we continued moving quickly and that I got a chance to present practical content for the audience. The first couple of presentations were forward looking, they spoke of what we could do and exposed some extremely high level concepts to improve quality. In the last meeting of November one of the attendees suggested to "use the majority of the next meeting time to train the attendees on something practical", something that they could take back to their teams and help to change process and culture to promote quality.
I knew just what to present. Something that I had started using with teams in my business unit, Risk Management. This wasn't even fully my own concept or idea, it was something that I had learned while attending TriAgile in Raleigh-Durham area back in April 2017. That conference session was led by Jenny Bramble and really hit home as a way to get all teams focused on testing the most valuable features for the customer and the most risky items from an implementation perspective to ensure that in the end the customer result was better than it may have been in the past.
The goal of risk management was to reduce the amount of tests run, to reduce the hardening sprint duration, all while focusing methodically to eliminate risk and deliver the most valuable customer features with the fewest impactful defects. At that point my teams had already finished up an entire quarterly release and implemented a risk scoring process and communication with the business stakeholders to ensure alignment and the right sized testing effort based on customer value and complexity. I thought it was pretty successful and was happy to share this with others.
The session I delivered went really well, most teams present said that they had an "informal" method of doing what I was talking about, but nothing written or reviewed regularly. There was obvious room for improvement and I had a few requests for the slides from the presentation. I always put the slides and the recording of the session on a Confluence site by the meeting date so that anyone in the company can locate the information and potentially benefit from it.
After this mid-December session it was time to hit the snooze button, as many teams through the company were heads down trying to finish up things before year end or they were on PTO or just in that state where distractions about the holiday gifts and the family events and everything else was taking time from "voluntary" participation in a QCoE. This closes out 2017 and the first 2.5 months of QCoE startup.
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