9:15am – I arrive at the office, check my email and the general Agile support box. Our stand-up is happening soon so I login to our tool and check out the burndown and see what tasks are in progress.
10am – standup. The team wasn’t really happy about standing up at the standups from the get-go so today is the first day we’re actually sitting down. I have to remind a couple of the guys that they aren’t reporting to me so there’s no need to face me and report their status. A couple of guys get into a discussion that doesn’t belong in the standup so I ask them to let the rest of the folks finish up and then whomever needs to be involved in the side discussion can stick around afterwards.
10.20am – The Standup finishes a bit later than usual but since it’s demo day the team wants to make sure they are understand what they need to do before 2pm. Myself and a couple of other team members walk over to the environment support folks and ask that they not allow any changes into the environment we’ll be demo’ing in today and we get the lead’s mobile number so we can call him in the event there is any issue.
11am – We pack up and drive down to the head office, 1 team member stays back to handle any last minute issues. Today’s the first day the team is doing a full demo to about 40 – 50 people including some stakeholders, observers not directly involved in what we’re doing and, of course, our product owner. I wanted to make sure the team had the chance to experience this since most of the time in traditional settings stakeholders don’t get the chance to meet the team.
1pm – We get to the boardroom for the demo, setup the projector and go over the stories with the product owner and the general script for the demo. The Product Owner asks me how we are supposed to keep the demo from going off the rails just in case there is too much feedback so I let her know that when the demo kicks off, we’ll set that expectation properly. Feedback is great, but I remind her that it should be in context of what we are showing them and other feedback can wait until after the demo.
1.45pm – 15 minutes to showtime and our QA environment goes down. Uh oh. A quick email and phone call and at 1:58pm we’re back in business.
2:15pm – After the last straggler stumbles in we get started and the product owner welcomes everyone and introduces everyone to the team. As the Product Owner is going through the stories (we had given her a demo previously to get the stories accepted) one of the QA guys on the team notices a problem so I grab an index card from my utility belt and write it down.
3pm – The demo finishes up and I have 4 or 5 new index cards with questions and feedback. Not too much, but some ideas we’ll want to prioritize against the existing backlog. A couple of folks stick around for more questions and I have a brief chat with the Product Owner about some of the new cards.
4pm – I head over to chat with my boss and let her know how the demo went. She asks me to setup a couple of training sessions for the next week and we review a blog post I wrote for our internal blog.
She gives me an update on a new team that is forming and will be starting up soon. Since my team is already doing well, taking on mentoring a new team won’t be stretching me too thin but we talk about the risks and how we can help each other out with it.
5.30 – After a quick check of the Agile support inbox and couple of quick chats with a few other folks wanting some advise, I head out for the day.