Usage Best Practices

[swestfisher]

Hi All,
I am trying out the free version (FQHCs have no money) for the Information Systems department. I have a background in software development so I am familiar with Scrum in that arena. However, adapting to an IS/IT department working our way toward ITIL has left me with a few deployment strategy questions. My department consists of service desk staff (who sometimes do projects), technical management in charge of infrastructure, and application management who often have very software development like tasks. My questions revolve around “Projects” and “Features” primarily. Should “Projects” in icescrum come and go as teams change, or is the project construct more to enforce the strict priority list for a team? Does it make sense to have team members in multiple teams? Can a backlog item in one project be dependent on an item in another project? I feel like I am beating a round peg into a square hole trying to fit what we are doing to icescrum – which probably means I’m doing it wrong 🙂
Steve

[Nicolas Noullet]

Hi Steve,

If you intend to use iceScrum for anything else than software project management & development then I am afraid that it will not be smooth.

Unfortunately I am not very familiar with IS/IT management, and I’ve heard of ITIL but I don’t have enough experience with it to be sure how it translates in terms of Agile methodology and more specifically to Scrum.

Thus, I’ll try to rather focus on what I know: iceScrum.
– It is not possible to define dependences between items of different projects.
– An iceScrum team can work on several iceScrum projects, a project have one and only one team working on it.
– There is one priority list (product backlog) per project
– In addition to the members coming from the team (ScrumMasters and Team Members), every project has its own members, namely Product Owners and Stakeholders. Every role has associated permissions, see https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/roles-teams-projects/

Whether there should be only one iceScrum project (hence one priority list) for one team, or separate iceScrum projets (each having its own priority list) is really dependent on the context.

I hope that helps!

[swestfisher]

You answer is very helpful with how to manage projects and features, is there support for the concept of a scrum-of-scrums?
Thanks,
Steve

[Nicolas Noullet]

Steve,

Scrum of scrums is a very hard problem. Being in the agile world for more than ten years, we have yet to see any good “generic” solution for this problem. Our latest experience was at a big agile conference this month where the most popular solution (SAFe) was mentioned a lot, and it was not in very flattering terms.

That’s why we are very careful when integrating scaling features. For the moment iceScrum offers only two inter-project features :
– Copy stories between projects (only on iceScrum Pro, and you must be Product Owner of both projects)
– Display an aggregated timeline of several projects grouped under a project bundle (only on iceScrum Pro) : https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/project-bundle/

We are still thinking about this problem and we will come with new solutions in the upcoming major version of iceScrum (7) once it is released.

Nicolas

[swestfisher]

Exactly what I needed, thanks!
Steve

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