Frozen water and felled trees on the Univeristy campus

Most of the administrative stuff is in place now -Implementation Group meeting regularly, stakeholders identified and on-board and project manager appointed (me!). David Sweet, our Systems Archtiecture Analyst has begun the process of mapping out current processess and workflows. The Project Team has spent time creating the ‘epic’ user stories, giving them values and acceptance criteria and getting all that into Sharepoint. The Agile approach means that we create user stories, written originally on postcards, with wording in this format:

As a (role), I would like (desire/goal),So that (benefit)

We then prioritise these user stories and begin to break them down into tasks. Members of the project team can view the users stories and their rankings on the Project Sharepoint site.

This phase is unsurprisingly one which features many, many questions for the team but we are now starting to see a way forward and have planned our first sprint for the end of the month. This is when the developers will evaluate current systems and look at the alternatives available so we can settle on a platform. To outside observers it may seem that not much is happening but that is not the case. Once we have a clear path and identified which tasks are to be tackled first the actual developemnt work of the project can begin.

As always with the early phases of projects we are struggling with potential scope creep but determined to keep a lid on it. It being better to have realistic goals and to deliver quality solutions than to take on too much and be mediocre.