digest of publications #18
Scrum that exhausts the team, a guide to BPMN, Notion and Miro replacements, communication with stakeholders and everything interesting that was written about project management this week. We read all the publications and selected the coolest and most useful ones for you. Read, save and apply!
Basics and Guides
Why Scrum is so exhausting
Sprints lack breaks, severely limit autonomy, and do not provide enough time for preparation. It is no wonder that today's developers seem more depressed. Scrum is a poor fit for the nature of their work, and they are powerless to change that. The only solution is to restore autonomy and professionalism to software development.
Let developers control both their craft and their workflow.
BPMN 2.0 a universal approach to diagramming
A guide that is useful for those who are just taking their first steps towards standardizing their approach to describing the logic of business processes, as well as for those who already have experience using this notation.
Requirements Quality Criteria with Examples (Part 1)
Requirements Quality Criteria with Examples (Part 2)
In an ideal world, testing should occur at all stages of the software life cycle, starting with design, when there is no product yet, but only a description of what the customer wants to receive. This description can be called a specification, technical task (TT) or simply requirements. Requirements are checked for compliance with quality criteria. This process is often described as a separate type of testing – requirements testing.
The material in two parts is about key criteria, in particular completeness, consistency, correctness, feasibility and others.
Business Modeling in IT Development
A business model describes existing schemes and rules for performing certain work processes, and may also include recommendations for changing them. What does this give? Modeling helps to see what is happening as a system – to cover all participants, their work and relationships at one glance. During modeling, new, previously unidentified questions and nuances inevitably emerge, especially in terms of logic and expediency. Also, if, at the request of interested parties or during the analysis, it turns out that reengineering is necessary, the model will suggest optimization criteria
User Story Map as a Tool for Managing Expectations and More: Practical Tips
How to work on large initiatives using a User Story Map at the Discovery stage (the initial stage of developing a task, at which the main requirements are identified and the set business goals are analyzed).
A Systematic Approach to Implementing Kanban with STATIK Workshop: A Step-by-Step Guide
STATIK (from English Systems Thinking Approach To Introducing Kanban) is deciphered as a “system approach to presenting Kanban”. It was developed by David Anderson and was conceived as the main approach to implementing Kanban in companies. STATIK shows how the system behaves as a whole, and not through the analysis of its individual parts. The material is about using this approach.
What is the iterative process in projects and development
An iterative process is a step-by-step gradual improvement of a project or product. The iterative approach is a logical and reasonable approach for many areas. The authors provide an overview of its application in project activities, revealing its advantages and disadvantages.
Working on mistakes: how the Agile approach helps to overcome the crisis
A longread about “fuck-up management” (anti-crisis management of a company): why things can go wrong and how to avoid it, what does Agile have to do with it, and what is important to know when taking on the task of overcoming a crisis.
Kanban Board and WIP Limits: How to Eliminate Overload in Workflows
Why unfinished tasks “burn out”, how to visualize constraints to establish a dialogue with the business and increase the predictability of the process and, of course, how the Kanban board and WIP limit will help us with this.
Project Manager and Team
Leadership in the development team
Tips that help manage a team and develop leadership in technical specialists of various profiles: how to formulate and convey values to the team, how to be a guarantor of stability, not to hire people with weak soft skills, learn to build a system that works without you, and much more.
How Not to Burn Your Team Down, or Why Work-life Balance Is a Manager's Task
Any manager can influence the state of the team. And an energetic employee who loves his job will bring more happiness to the company than a burned-out and tired one. The material is exactly about how to motivate the team to maintain Work-life balance.
How to Build Communication with Stakeholders: From Impact Assessment to Successful Collaboration
Stakeholders influence all stages of the product life cycle: they participate in budget allocation, manage team resources, and help set priorities. Understanding their roles and interests, proper communication, and emotional involvement are key elements of effective product management.
7 Inspiring Books on Product and Team Management
In the review: “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” “Emotional Courage,” “The Goal: A Process of Continuous Improvement,” “Difficult Decisions: How to Manage a Business When There Are No Easy Answers,” and other well-known (and not so well-known) books.
Victory over chaos: how we improved the work of systems analysts and set up interaction in a large team
About how we identified weak points in the work of the analytics team and how we fixed them so that everything worked more efficiently. In short: we developed a template for writing and maintaining documentation, started cross-reviewing colleagues' artifacts, and made communication constant.
How to reconcile IT and business, making development predictable?
Situation: the team is overwhelmed with tasks, the backlog is swelling, a huge number of unplanned tasks from the business. What to do? The author believes that it is necessary to change the processes – to make them transparent, predictable. And also to protect the team from “trash development” (when requirements arise and change on the fly).
Remote Work Across Time Zones – Research
Remote employees living in different time zones are often forced to sacrifice their free time for the sake of work communication. This article explains who finds this regime especially difficult and how organizations can reduce the risks.
Onboarding with a competency matrix: quick adaptation of newcomers
Onboarding determines how quickly a new employee becomes an independent unit and at the same time part of the team. The absence of a plan for the adaptation of newcomers and criteria for its assessment leads to a loss of time and money for the company. The competency matrix helps to structure and speed up onboarding.
Hybrid schedule: how to organize work conveniently for everyone
Tools and recommendations that facilitate team interaction — both in the office and remotely. Among them: using platforms with online access, expanding the list of communication channels with employees.
Experience and tools
Agile in a functional project. Organization of work on IT rails
When talking about projects in the Agile methodology, most often an IT team is imagined. The authors decided to apply Agile to a project in the field of labor protection. There are no serious specifics in the publication, but there is an example of “inventing” metrics using AI and creating a change program for the team and the work process based on them.
Pain and misunderstanding at retro: how we improved problem identification and resolution in the team
About how the authors introduced retro in a team that had never had it before – why it was needed at all (the team grew, communications became more complicated), what mistakes they made (a lot of time) and what they ultimately achieved (the emotional state of the team improved, processes became clearer).
How We Automated Project Requirements Management with AI and ML
With the help of AI, they came up with software that automatically traces requirements between documents, which ultimately helped to significantly improve requirements management.
Automation of production management: how we simplified the development of new parts at construction materials factories
The authors encountered the problem of disparate systems when developing new parts – it led to unnecessary labor costs and problems with coordination. The solution was to replace everything with a single information system.
Redmine vs. Business Growth: How We Solved Support Scaling Issues at Orion Soft
About the experience of implementing an ITSM system instead of the good old Redmine, which was outdated (?!), crashed and generally led to increased workload and confusion in orders. They talk about the process of moving, improvements, difficulties and results.
Notion is dead, long live Obsidian
Testing the best self-hosted Notion analogues
How I Quit Notion and Started Working at TEAMLY. Personal Experience
How jetMinds transferred all data from Notion to its Russian equivalent in 2 days
Notion is indeed gone, and the result has been a flurry of posts about alternatives, both paid and free.
How We Imported Almost 17 Million Objects from Miro in 5 Days
Miro may still be with us (for some reason), but the Holst team is sharing their experience of transferring boards to their service. (By the way, we very easily moved from miro to this service and are happy with everything so far, thanks guys!)
It also seems to be going away, and in this publication, the following services are named as alternatives: weeek, LiderTask, Strive, Kaiten, Planfix and others.
Top 8 GanttPro Analogues: Russian Services for Building Gantt Charts
The popular (and very convenient) service is still with us, but now they are preparing a list of successors for it: from Kaiten and Aspro to Bitrix24 and Advanta. A comparison table is attached.
Top Project Management Services from Russia and the CIS
Review of domestic software and services, with key features and shortcomings. On the stage are the same (Weeek, Shtab, Bitrix24, Megaplan, Yougile), as well as lesser-known ones: Easy Project, OpenProject, Worksection).
Thanks for reading! If we missed any interesting material, please share it in the comments.
Digest archives, new materials, book and course reviews for RP and analysts – Here.
