Here is something that may be crippling your agile project/team if you are not yet practicing it:
Story Based Customer Reviews
During the engineering meeting (you do have one of those right?) stories are assigned and to developer/s and prioritized. The developer must go back to the customer and obtain the requirements/specifications for said story (but that you already knew).
Once the developer has working code the must take it back to the customer for review and feedback. This is a crucial step that if skipped will hinder the process, delay stories and result in incomplete iterations. When an iteration is not fully completed due to reviews and feedback from the customer after the end of said iteration the entire project timeline will suffer.
I can’t emphasize how important getting customer feedback as soon as possible within the iteration is. Our team is partially distributed and so are our customers. After the request for feedback has been initiated, which is typically done by e-mail, the developer moves on the next story. Due to customer availability the feedback may take 2-3 days to come back at which point the developer has time to make necessary adjustments and is just about ready to submit the next story for customer review – keeping the project moving.
We have created a new state for stories in our PM tool called ‘Customer Review’. The predecessor state is ‘Open’ and from ‘Customer Review’ it will go to test (QA), with the requirement of the customer acceptance comment.
Open -> Customer Review -> Testing -> Done - > Done-Done
Done-Done happens after the iteration demo.
Be honest with yourself, you shouldn’t be spending so much time reading feeds.
Yes, I know, you are thinking to yourself, why would I give up reading my feeds. I can’t do that. Yes you can. Don’t you want to be more productive?
Anyways, if you can’t drop them ‘cold turkey’ at least compromise. I used to spend 30-45 minutes each day reading my feeds, that is way too much time in week. I started to consider ways in which I could gain some of that time back. The first option and what I did for the first month of my experiment was to trim the feeds. Initially this worked out nicely, but after a week I realized I was missing a lot of important news from blogs I enjoyed. That was not acceptable, so I re-subscribed to the ones I enjoyed the most.
I then realized that most of my feeds were not terribly time sensitive. The next experiment revolved around limiting when and where I read my feeds. Basically devoting downtime and alternative devices for RSS reading. The first portion of the new regime was to read feeds when I am on-the-go such as waiting rooms, restrooms or during exercise, the iPhone + Google Reader makes this a snap.
Whatever items had been left over I would read once or twice a week sitting on the couch which watching TV. This normally took 30 minutes each time. This is working out perfectly, I don’t miss any of my favorite news, and still manage to save 3-4 hours a week which can be put to better use.
I am about to state the obvious. Perhaps the simplest concepts you have ever heard. If Inbox 0 sounds more like a legend than reality, you are doing it wrong. I used to be drowned in email myself, at one point it looked like the reason for my existence was to answer emails.
Here are a couple of concepts to get you out of your misery and make you a more productive person. In other words, have a life outside of your inbox. GTD is greatly overrated so I won’t be talking about that here. Some of these may not apply to you, most will.
Please note, if your inbox has over 500 unread messages at the moment, you will need to declare email bankruptcy (delete all message) and start from scratch. Don’t worry, the important ones will make their way back into the inbox shortly.
Let’s start with the basics:
Stop Sending Email
As crazy as this may sound, the more email you send the more replies you get. Also stop sending “Reply-all” messages. It is very unlikely that all those people need to see your message or your reply. Only include the absolute most necessary recipients.
Unsubscribe from ALL newsletters. Really.
No one needs all that promo stuff. If you need a new cellular phone you will do your own research. If you need a new LCD monitor, you will search for it.
Unsubscribe from Groups
Unsubscribe from 95% of the groups you are currently receiving email notifications from. Groups that you absolutely can’t unsubscribe from, elect to receive the abridged version of the notifications. One per day is usually the case.
Review your Messages for Patterns
Create a folder for receipts, important, clients, travel and action items. Create rules to automatically move mail to those folders. Your folder names may be different from mine, remember you are looking for patterns.
Stop Flagging Email
Flagging is completely useless. You are basically adding yet another reference to something in your memory which leaves an empty node in your brain wasting space, sort of like a rogue process.
Remove the New-mail Sound
Nothing is more disturbing to productivity than that annoying sound mail clients make when you receive a new email. Do you silence your mobile phone when you go inside a church or meeting? Then silence your mail when it is time to work.
Turn off Automatic New Email Check
Imagine if your mailman came by your house every 15 minutes and potentially left new mail for you. You would be much more likely to stop what you are doing and go outside to check for new letters. How many times a day do you check you physical mailbox? Probably once.
Open your Email Reader 1-3 times a Day.
In the beginning this will be difficult. Hide the shortcuts to the application which will make you think about what you are doing every time you hunt to open it. Do this until it becomes second nature.
Make Constant use of Read/Unread Buttons
If you glance at a message and realize you will not be able to action upon it instantly, stop, mark it as unread and move on. One may ask, won’t this create more new email in your inbox? The answer is NO. It gives you the liberty to move on to the next messages, deleting, marking as read or moving them to their final resting places. This will leave behind only the messages you need to act upon at a later time. Move them to a designated folder.
Enable Threads
This compacts a conversation of multiple email messages into a single topic. This gives you the impression you have less pending items. Instead of seeing 10 unread messages under the same topic, you just see that the topic has pending messages to be read. See sample below taken from my receipts folder in Mail.app
Hide Unread Count (if possible)
The new Gmail Labs let’s you do this. No need to see exactly how many unread messages you have in your inbox other than for panic generating purposes. Mail.app unfortunately likes to create panic by showing your unread messages count.
Turn off Notifications
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, whatever it may be, make sure they are only emailing you important messages, and not every time someone browsers your profile.
Delete Button is your Friend
Do not be afraid to delete it, if you think about deleting it, chances are that the best thing to do is delete it.
And lastly rejoice.