We're Agile, we use index cards!

Missing project deadlines and when asked “How long will it take?” you start sounding like one of the Shirk brothers from The Money Pit, and say confidently and succinctly “2 weeks.” However, you know that you have absolutely no idea when “it” (the feature, report, task or software project initiative you are managing) will be done. You start scrambling around looking for a better way to organize your projects fast and get things done in a short amount of time and voilá, you stumble across Agile Project Management. “Agile… that’s fast and flexible, just what I need”.

Quickly reading through some web sites, book synopsis and blogs the one thing that sticks in your mind is index cards. “Nice!” Now you have some tangible way of seeing how much work there is to do and better yet, you can have other people (the stakeholders) do the work for you. (I’ll talk more about this in another post) So you schedule a meeting with business owners, content experts and developers and you start the meeting by explaining the process.

“First, everyone (business owners, content experts AND developers <- huh?) grab some index cards and start writing down some features you would like to see in the product and create a pile in the middle of the table. Don’t worry about what other people are writing we will go through them together. You have fifteen minutes.” For the first few seconds everyone is just looking around, not really sure what to do, so you grab a pen and start writing something down that you would like to see in the product. Soon everyone is writing away, throwing index cards to the middle of the table. After about 10 minutes most people have stopped writing and are staring off into space, up at the ceiling or have their head buried in their hands, occasionally someone blurts out “Ohhh… this would be nice” and starts writing away.

After the 15 minutes, “Ok, now we are going to go through these and see if there are any duplicates and if we can group any functionality together.” So you grab the pile of cards, make sure they are all facing up and begin to read or try to read what people wrote on the cards. For the next 2 to 3 hours you read a story out loud, making sure everyone understands what the person who wrote the story meant (which can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 30+ minutes) and put it into a pile of cards that represent similar “types” of feature requests.

“Now, let’s vote on which stories we think are more important than others.” So you begin a voting process more like a sorting process, going through each card and placing them in an order of most important (whichever card the majority of the group feels is the most critical or beneficial) to the least important. By this time most of the group is zoning out or has mentally checked out and the process moves along fairly quickly. At the end meeting (or Marathon) you have a stack of index cards with feature requests with the most important on top to the least important on the bottom. “Sweet!” You plod off back to your cubicle, office or cave and sit there with a little smile on your face, “This agile methodology is awesome, look at all of this functionality we can implement, some of it good too.” Slowly the smile fades away from your face as you remember you are still facing the same question you started with “How long will it take?” Soon the smile begins to return to your face, “I have no idea, but we are Agile, I can spin this for the next few months and by then we will have something rolled out.” (At least you hope you do)