It’s been over a month since I blogged or tweeted. Aside from this post, it’ll be probably another month before I do so again. I’d especially like to apologize to the people looking for help with Shashin and my other plugins, as I have not been responding to support requests (for my plugin users, please see this post).

As I mentioned back in the Spring, I’ve been leading our web team’s transition to scrum. Since then we’ve been working with Agile/scrum training coaches Bob Hartman and Darian Rashid, and they’ve done an amazing job helping us make the transition a successful one.

Before starting with scrum we had poor visibility into our future work – planning was extremely difficult. Now we’re getting better visibility, and it’s something of a “be careful what you wish for” situation. I’ve been working nights and weekends for the past month, getting a handle on all our projects and our schedule, so I can manage expectations for both my team and for our stakeholders. Work is the first thing I think about when I wake up, and the last think I think about before I go to sleep at night. It’s going to stay that way for at least a few more weeks (possibly months), as we get through this transition.

We have several goals: improving quality, teamwork, etc. But our first is to improve our planning: to align our workload with our actual capacity, establish a sustainable pace, and create reliable expectations for our stakeholders. With scrum’s velocity measures and other metrics, my ultimate goal is to clearly demonstrate to our stakeholders what our team already knows: that we do an incredible amount of quality work with a very small staff, and that if we’re expected to do even more, we need more people.