Symbiote’s project fundamentals
Amanda Brown, Head of Strategy & Projects explains: ‘We know successful projects involve a multitude of factors coming together to deliver amazing outcomes – taking a cookie cutter approach just doesn’t work.’
Ways of Working
Our projects are built on great communication, strong relationships, expertise in every area, a shared understanding of what’s happening and ensuring the final product is the best quality and exceeds expectations.
While we don’t always follow an identical script, everyone at Symbiote has a shared ethos and approach to everything we do here.
These are our project fundamentals.
Project fundamentals
Get the project approach right
We chose the right methodology to suit the project.
Fundamental decision points include: Scope/Time/Budget fit and organisational agile experience.
Use Scrum for teams who love to learn and share
Scrum is totally focussed on getting stuff done. As a framework, it encourages great communication, self organisation, collective learning from experience and continuous improvement.
Scrum is the perfect fit for a project with an outcome-focussed goal, with a flexible or shifting scope, in an organisation familiar with running Agile projects. For a team like ours where everyone's always learning and sharing, Scrum projects fit the bill perfectly.
Start strong
We agree on how things are going to work right up front. Everyone involved understands why we’re here, how we’ll communicate, who can make decisions, how we'll know when work is ready and what the release process looks like.
We test this understanding by asking tricky questions or posing possible scenarios so we have good conversations early. When we all understand what we're trying to achieve we get on with the work.
The goal here is a shared understanding of how each project is going to work, to avoid surprises. This includes a shared understanding of:
the vision and the value the project will bring to end-users
everyone's role on the team
dependencies
Build a healthy squad culture
We work hard to build rapport between the whole team as fast as possible. The project team will comprise different roles working across different organisations and teams, so it's crucial we put in the time early to get everyone working together.
To get to 'we’re all in this together' as quickly as possible, we use tried and true processes to build real trust and ensure transparency from project kick off.
A vital first step involves working out what everyone needs to do their best work and support each other.
Run meetings that matter
Throughout the life of the project, it's essential to make sure ceremonies are useful and truly communicative: sprint planning that sets us up for success from the start, concise stand ups, showcases that celebrate progress and share that progress with stakeholders and retros that are thorough and outcomes-focussed.
The roadmap is a powerful artefact, and it will change
The product roadmap shows progression over time at a higher level, and how sprints will deliver on business priorities long term.
That roadmap will and should change. Part of the power of Agile is that you aren’t stuck with a set of deliverables that were articulated months, or even years ago. Instead, you can evolve with changes in the environment, customer insights and learnings from previous releases.
Everyone learns, the environment changes, and the product evolves – for the better.
UX is critical, all the time
From the initial deep understanding of customer needs informing product design, to regular usability testing, to ‘the user research says’ in every ceremony – UX is embedded in the team at every step.
This ensures we’re not a feature farm, as we’re focussed on building solutions that improve people's lives.
Testing is a huge part of the picture
Reliable, high-quality testing reduces risks around releases and enables us to deliver a quality product, without problems.
Our QA team is involved from the start, which drives rigour around requirements, acceptance criteria and delivery against those requirements. They work hard to find future efficiencies through automation and helping developers write more testable code.
Get to the business of delivering real, positive change
All of the above comes together, so we can quickly get down to building really useful services for end users. Regular release cycles mean improvements are delivered to customers fast, and we capture further opportunities to learn and improve.
Wrap up
Setting up a project team with shared values, building a culture where everyone can do their best work, building amazing solutions users really want – this all adds up to a powerful experience for everyone involved. The outcomes are extraordinary.
