threetwelve creative

An Agile Agency

THREETWELVE & YOU

•  The Scrum Question: How can we better deliver product to our customers?

•  Scrum, an Agile software development process, has been in

use since the 1990s. It is what ThreeTwelve is adopting to create the Agile Agency approach.

•  Developed because long-term project planning methodologies like Waterfall are inaccurate, and place emphasis on top-down process

HISTORY

KEY AGILE PRINCIPLES

3 Collaborate more

with clients

4 Focus on delivering a

workable product instead of documentation about

a product

1 Communication

with parties is more important than SOPs

2 Be open to change

Elevate people over process

BETTER TOGETHER

•  ThreeTwelve has thrived not just because of exceptional work, but also because of exceptional relationships.

•  Clients repeatedly call out ThreeTwelve’s collaborative nature and the personal relationships they form with us.

It’s in our agency DNA to elevate people over process

EVEN BETTER TOGETHER

•  That said, ThreeTwelve is a business and we need efficiencies and processes in order to operate and to be able to scale.

•  Our clients are also businesses, and we should delight them by safeguarding their interests and meeting their needs.

AGILE-Y-ER

•  Agile pulls our clients into the process by making them stakeholders in everything we do.

•  Of course, any business’s clients are stakeholders – but in a traditional agency/client model clients have much less input into the process and there is much less transparency.

AGILE ROLES

Stakeholders - Client team members

Cosmic Overlord – ThreeTwelve member;

keeps process on course

Creative Team – ThreeTwelve staff

Product Owner – Main client POC

AGILE PROCESS: THE SPRINT

•  The Sprint is the core time unit of the Agile process. At ThreeTwelve our Sprints are two weeks (10 business days)

•  Short Sprints allow us to deliver products regularly and to

rapidly make iterative changes to improve our process

•  All work that is taken into a Sprint should be completed in that Sprint

The Sprint - Tasks

•  Work to be done in a Sprint is broken down into tasks

•  Every task is assigned a point value that indicates its relative difficulty to complete

•  Points are NOT time-correlated. Possible points a task can be assigned are 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 or 21. A one-point task is easy. A 21-point task is difficult and likely to take the whole Sprint.

The Sprint - TASK POINTS

•  The point system reflects that we as humans are relatively accurate at predicting the time to accomplish easy tasks, but wildly inaccurate at predicting larger, longer-term tasks

•  Points allow us insight into what our true workload capacity is

•  Better insight means better planning, and better ability to complete workload.

THE SPRINT - TASKS

•  The ThreeTwelve team for a client has a maximum point capacity that it can accomplish in any given Sprint

•  The sum of points for tasks taken into a Sprint should equal the team’s capacity

•  Matching task points to team capacity ensures tasks brought in to a Sprint are completed.

•  Tasks can be in any of these discrete states: Backlog, Current, Working, Done

The Sprint BOARD

The Sprint BOARD

•  The Sprint Board is a visual representation of all the tasks in a Sprint

•  There is a column for each state a task can be in

•  As a task changes state, it’s moved to the appropriate column.

Lifecycle of a Task - Backlog

•  All tasks begin life in the Backlog, which is a running record of work that needs to be done. The Backlog is the only state that spans Sprints.

•  At a planning meeting that happens before each Sprint, clients identify tasks and prioritize them.

•  ThreeTwelve decomposes tasks where necessary, and assigns point value. Final prioritizing can be done after any task decomposition.

Lifecycle of a Task – Current

•  During the planning meeting, tasks are moved from the Backlog state to Current state until the team’s point capacity has been reached

Lifecycle of a Task - Working

•  When a ThreeTwelve team member is ready to start working a task, they will put their name on it and move it from Current Sprint to Working On

Lifecycle of a Task – DONE

•  When the task has been completed, it is moved from Working to Done.

•  If it’s a task that has been decomposed to also have a “Client Review and Changes” task, that task is then moved into the “Working” state

BUT WHAT ABOUT •  Client needs can change, even over the course of a single

Sprint.

•  ThreeTwelve capacity typically will NOT change over the course of a Sprint

•  If new tasks arise that must be completed during a given Sprint, the tasks are decomposed, given point values, and brought in

•  A matching point value of low-priority tasks is then moved from the Current Sprint back to the Backlog.

FAQs

•  Q. What if a task will take longer than one Sprint?

•  A. It should be decomposed into a set of smaller tasks, giving everyone a better idea of what’s done and what remains to be done

FAQs

•  Q. Can we see the Sprint board?

•  A. Yes. In the traditional Scrum environment, tasks are written on yellow sticky notes and stuck onto a physical Sprint board or wall. Stakeholders can come by at any time, look at all the sticky notes, and be apprised of Sprint progress.

ThreeTwelve uses a web app called Teamwork and have structured that to resemble a Sprint board pivoted into rows instead of columns. We will invite client team members to have access to that board so that you can see at any time during a Sprint what we’ve done and what we’re working on. We’re also working on our own Agile Agency software purpose-built to meet the needs of our agency and our clients.