Local Digital Project: Chatbots and AI

Getting Agile!

Image showing the training room with people talking

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;

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

Image of post it notes showing positive comments

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;

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.

Image showing the ideas the team had about culture

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….