The first third of our 2019 planning year is coming to a close and it is time for our first Review/Retrospective covering the last two months of work.  After this, we will go dark for December to enjoy the holidays and rest up before the second third of our planning year (January – April).

With our work transitioning from development to testing and marketing, we have shifted from Scrum based sprints to Kanban based iterations.  This post will cover the results and lessons from two Kanbans, 1.1 and 1.2.  As always, you can get all the details by from our weekly stand ups.

Review

Agile reviews are an opportunity to hold ourselves accountable by identifying how much of what we planned we actually completed.

Claiming Done

  • Setup alpha.holoseat.com and back end surveys to capture feedback from Alpha Testers
  • Published first Alpha Tester guest blog post, Working Out with a Wargen in World of Warcraft
  • Opened weekly stand up meetings to Alpha Testers
  • Began relocating corporation to address logistics issues with current location
  • Conducted research on better utilizing social media resources to build following ahead of crowd funding campaign
  • Wrote a Holoseat Testimonials page (thanks to our testers for sharing their stories)
  • Started the “How I Holoseat” blog series to share testimonials on the blog
  • Research influencer marketing
  • Submitted Holoseat to Hackaday

Not Claiming done

  • Relocation of the corporation (blocked on state government)
  • Holoseat trademark (blocked on relocation of the corporation)
  • Build Facebook community around Alpha Testers (dropped from plan, going to rework the plan)
  • Wrap up final paperwork related to Alpha Test

Retrospective

Agile retrospectives are the means by which we “inspect and adapt”.  This is our chance to promote what works and adjust what does not.

What went well?

  • Great first guest blog post
  • Good use of research into moving businesses between states turned into huge time savings in the process (domestication vs reincorporation)
  • Good use of inspect and adapt mid-iteration around use of social media when planned activities were not working
  • Did a good job of sticking to PY19 goals of focusing on marketing and business (notice we did not claim done on any technical items in this iteration)
  • Happy with how the testimonials page/How I Holoseat combo turned out
  • Our unfinished work is predominantly items that were blocked or we reworked the plan (vs just things we did not get around to)

What did not go well?

  • We really must improve how we go about doing social media and marketing
  • Uneven distribution of workload due to extenuating circumstances

What can we do better?

  • Bring a marketer on board
  • Try moving to 2 stand ups per week during PY19 Kanban 2.1 and evaluate if this helps with workload distribution