From Specification to Collaboration; one Agency's Move to Scrum

At Amazee Labs, we pride ourselves in producing awesome websites and making clients happy. In the past, we achieved this by sitting down with the client at project kickoff and laying the roadmap for how the project build would go. We specified everything, in day long discovery workshops. Then we'd tackle design, and finally, we would build. 

Clients were happy. Sites were pretty. But there was room for improvement.

In 2015, the Amazee Labs team saw an opportunity to improve our development process to better match internal and external needs. We adopted a Scrum-based Agile workflow which allowed us to work on multiple client projects at the same time without burning out our developers and still producing timely, quality code.

Since implementing Scrum, we eliminated the bottleneck of a single technical lead, specifying everything at the beginning of a project, brought clients and developers together, and improved the accuracy of work estimations

In this session, I'll share our experience of adopting Scrum as an Agile development framework, what's worked, what's been hard, and what we've tweaked to work for us. 

You will find out how we:

• Keep organized, focused, and motivated while working on multiple projects 
• Improved team communication and morale 
• Handle shifting workloads (and vacations!) in an agency environment without impacting delivery or team happiness
• Involve the PO in the living build process
• Break down work into Epics, Stories, Tasks (project managers, this is for you!)
• Estimate more accurately (and why this makes clients happy)
• Run effective retrospectives with a distributed team 

If there's interest, we can schedule a BOF afterward so attendees can share their experiences of implementing Scrum in their own teams.