When I started at Omni Biotech last August, there was no formal development structure. While I was the only developer, this was workable, but as more developers joined the team, it was important to create a structure for releases, updates and prioritising features. Due to my prior experience with agile development and its popularity with developers (Omonije, 2024), I decided to develop a simple scrum-inspired sprint for our team. Creating the documentation and schedule was simple; however, running these meetings was challenging.
I drew on my experience at Flight Centre to create a template document, attached as an artefact, for us to update each other on our weekly progress. Writing this weekly update and discussing it in the meeting was very beneficial as it allowed us to celebrate our successes and motivate each other to continue progressing. It was also beneficial for my reflection journal as it was easy to review my work for the year and select the largest projects and my learnings from each week.
Artefact: An example of the weekly standup meeting updates
For the sprint meetings, I again drew on my experience at Flight Centre, as well as my Software Engineering Concepts class to structure a sprint planning & retro session. I found it difficult to positively push these meetings forward, I can often focus on the negatives and during a one-on-one with Will we discussed how we could reframe these to be more motivating. That ended with an update to the wording and mostly changing my thought process from “where did we fail” to “what didn’t work for us” and “what did I do” to “what went well”.
I believe these changes really helped us work together as a team and really made me consider the power of my words in meetings, especially as a leader. I also feel more confident running these sessions in a professional manner, although I don’t believe I would want to do this as a full-time career.
References
Omonije, Ajibola. (2024). Agile Methodology: A Comprehensive Impact on Modern Business Operations. International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR). 13. 10.21275/SR24130104148.