First week

In my first week I had to do the normal onboarding activities (hr paperwork, acquire logins, learn my way around, meet people, get my computer).

My personal goal for the week was to get a feeling for the type of work the teams I would be working with do, what agile rituals were happening, a high level summary of the projects in flight, and an idea of where we fit within the company. I also wanted to confirm why I was hired,

And what my bosses first improvement objectives and expectations were.

I had a slight miss understanding of which team I would start with but otherwise, I believe I reached my goals for the week.

I will be working with one developer team that currently has three week sprints, does daily scrum standups, has worked in Kanban at points, does not seem to have a regular scheduled retrospective (but has done them), does not seem to have regular demos, and I need to assess the quality of their backlog /grooming, and sprint kickoffs.

The team has mostly dedicated developers, with as needed sharing across teams. They are a mix of on site and offshore contractors. The team has an analyst resource which is shared. The scrum master was the lead developer.

My boss would like to be able to predict delivery dates after assessing an incoming request, and after that work to speed up that predictable date.

To accomplish that I need to assess:
-Story points are consistent within a team
-hours are being recorded
-non project time is being recorded so that I can
--make sure resources, especially when shared, are not over committed
--identify earlier when stories are going to roll to the next sprint and how that will impact completion date
--is there any recurring non project work that can be automated, decreased, or eliminated
-calculate velocity, average velocity, trends
-see if I can track waiting times
-work to document, and make templates, for recurring work. For example, there are a consistent sort of incoming new projects the team gets, can we have a clear checklist to make sure we have done everything to intake the project and not need to wait to start work. Can any parts be automated? Can the story epic, cards, task be automatically created and then tweaked, will this then allow us to predict accurately delivery dates assuming no unexpected work or resource changes.

I want to work to make sure everything is in jira (our project tracker) and I want to work to make all information that is needed regularly reports, and ideally self-service as soon as I can. Manual manipulation to create reports can lead to inconsistencies and is a waste of time. Also visibility into everything (status, risks, allocation) can allow the team to to work smarter, inform customers of changes or impacts earlier on, and means that one resource never needs to be waited on to get that view (the analyst or product manager or project manager or scrum master).

I also want to use the data to find the simple yet time-consuming tasks (ratio story points to work logged, work logged on identical repeat tasks) to automate.

I also want to try and reduce redundancy of work as that improves everyone's work life.

I will be taking on additional teams in the coming sprints.

I have started working with scrum masters within our group and groups in our division. I hope to work with them to come up with shared standards, term definitions, and practices as well as be able to share ideas.