We’ve just finished 3 days of Agile for Teams training with the GDS Academy in London. For the nine of us attending, the journey distances varied quite a bit (as did the quality of the hotels we stayed at, apparently).

This training was set up for us by the Local Digital Collaboration Unit as part of our funded project status. We also had our excellent project lead, Adam Thoulass, sitting in to provide counsel using his Beard of Wisdom.

For anyone in doubt, having your team in one place learning the same things together is a fantastic way to get to know each other and apply the learning to the practical aspects of your project.

What we covered

The course did a great job of covering the essentials of Agile, including;

• Agile culture
• The Agile Manifesto and its principles
• Creating user stories and the 3Cs
• Scrum theory, including an obligatory Lego exercise
• Scrum roles and ceremonies
• Story mapping
• Designing for accessibility
• Servant leadership
• Agile estimating
• Backlog refinement
• Kanban and Scrumban

Our retrospective really showed how much we got out of it all.

Planning our work

The afternoon of our last day was given over to us to start planning our project. By this time we’d already discussed issues with communication (not all those there knew what the project was seeking to achieve), so made the decision to use a dedicated Slack team to be the focus of everything we do from now on.

Our commitments

As we talked about next steps, it became clear that we need to agree what everyone participating in the project needed to do. So we arrived at this list;

• Every council has to pick an area of research to contribute to (not everyone has yet)
• All councils must be represented at an initial project kick-off meeting (date TBC)
• Everyone involved needs to be on the project Slack team (including our supplier)
• Everyone will update their Slack profile with full contact details (name, council, email, phone number, job role)
• Everyone will sign up to Trello (we’ll follow with a project Trello board soon)
• All councils will participate in stand-ups they are invited to
• We will publish by default - everything is considered public unless specified
• As many people as possible get involved in writing stories on this blog through the project.

Our culture

We used an exercise early on in the course to talk about how we wanted to work with each other, which was really positive.

We also committed to hold each other to account for our behaviours to reinforce this culture.

Our delivery partner

We were also really lucky to have a representative from our delivery partner, hot off the heels of our procurement exercise. This gave us a good hour to talk through thoughts, concerns, ideas we all had about how we’re going to work together.

We’ll be talking more about our delivery partner soon once all the contractual stuff has been finalised.

And finally…

No Lego animals were harmed during the course of this training, although scores of post-it notes gave themselves willingly….