Sarah Jane, a project manager at a small charity, took an online Agile course and brought sprints and backlogs to her team. The short videos and self-paced format let her learn without disrupting work, then implement two-week iterations that helped prioritize what mattered most.
Sarah Jane
A small charity
Approximately 5 minutes
Two-week sprints (two weeks)
For me it was because Agile was everywhere, like you would hear about Agile everywhere. And I knew that it was a path that as an organization we would eventually want to go down. And so I thought it's just really good timing for me as a project manager to understand Agile and unpack that a little bit more. Overall, I thought the course was really easy to go through. I liked that it's self paced because you know everyone's busy and so then you can actually do it in the time that you have, which is really good. I enjoy the shorter videos, so the 5 minute videos is helpful. And then the activities, I like activities because then you've got to actually put what you've learned into practical, which is really good as an organization. We're a smaller organization, so I think I mentioned before we're a charity and so we don't necessarily have all the different roles to go completely agile. But what this course did for me was help me understand what are some of the things we can start to do now to move towards that pathway of going agile. We have started applying some of the principles that we learned from the course already. You know, things like a background, we have a backlog for our projects, we have, we're running some of them with sprints, two week sprints, timeboxing. So what I found from the course is that sometimes you do a course and you don't necessarily apply your learnings. But I was able to from this course, which was great. Typically you start with the scope and you deliver that scope, right? And you take 12 months to deliver that scope. What we've been able to do is actually reiterate every two weeks or so often and go, actually, how do we best serve our supporters and how do we best serve our staff in order to increase our impact? And we're actually able to review that more regularly. And so more recently we actually went through our backlog and went, you know what, this is too big. We're not going to be able to deliver all of this by the end of the year. What are the key things we can deliver now that will bring the most value? And I think if we weren't writing that through Agile, we wouldn't have been able to answer those questions.
