Lean Web Operations — Planning for the unpredictable

In this talk, I'd like to share the story of how our Drupal hosting team nearly broke down under its workload and how lean and agile methodologies brought us back on track. 

With all its interruptions and incidents, web operations work sometimes feels like having to juggle chainsaws while baking a soufflé... In 2016, freistilbox suffered heavily from our failure to keep our work in flow. Internal initiatives and feature projects got delayed more and more, in some cases by months. Then we noticed a huge drop in customer satisfaction and trust. Finally, team members started showing severe signs of burnout such as fatigue, frustration and the feeling of letting everyone down. This required quick and major changes. In the last six months, we’ve completely overhauled how we manage our work load, and I'm happy to say we're back on a healthy trajectory.

In my talk, I'd like to share the details of what we did wrong and what got us back on track. Things to take away from this talk will be:

• How adopting Kanban gave us back focus and control
• How the RICE formula makes our project ranking simple
• How the Sweeper protects us from unplanned work
• How we communicate effectively in a distributed team
• How our company culture impacts our productivity

We've learned a lot and I'm happy to share these lessons — so you don't have to make the same mistakes.