Iteration Management – Post #1 – What is iteration management?
This post is a part of a series of posts about iteration management. If you want to start from the beginning, go here.
If you haven’t heard of iteration management before, maybe you hear the word “management” and you think “project management.” It’s similar, but not really. Here’s how I distinguish the two – project managers manage projects across iterations and maybe across multiple teams. An iteration manager manages the work done by one team within an iteration, although there might be some coordination with other teams.
An iteration manager helps to optimize the efficiency of the team. People on software development teams tend to like to focus on their tasks. They will strive to limit distractions and do whatever they can do get their work done, and sometimes this even comes at the expense of the team. In a way, this is good, because if you give someone a task to do, you want them to get it done efficiently. But in order for this team to truly function like a team, we need someone whose head is not in the weeds who can look at the bigger picture and make sure that the team is working in the most optimal way. This is where you come in.
An iteration manager is an unblocker. If team members are blocked by something, the iteration manager should try and get it resolved for them. An iteration manager should be proactively searching for blockers before people raise an issue because some people will either spend too much time trying to figure things out on their own or just not tell anyone that they are blocked.
You might have to be creative with how you do this, but you will learn to see the signs of someone being blocked. If you have a board/wall/online site/etc. where you have the iteration’s tickets, watch for things piling up in a certain status (whether it’s analysis, development, or testing). If you have people on the team that are working on multiple tasks at once, it could be because they can’t finish the first task until they get an answer from someone, so they’ve moved onto the second task. Or maybe you just notice that a certain feature isn’t getting done as fast as you thought it should and it causes you to ask a question.
Overall, your task is to help the team work as efficiently as possible. This doesn’t just mean “fast” (although that’s certainly part of it), it also means that you ensure that software is going to meet the needs of the business and the people that use the software. In order to do this, we’re going to use everything at our disposal, including data analysis, communication, and lots of intuition.
What I love about iteration management is that it allows you come up with creative ways to achieve the goal, and there’s no one right way to do it. The rest of this series is going to give you a bunch of tools, tips, and tricks to get the job done, but ultimately you’ll have to use your own intuition to do it well.
Read the next post in this series, What’s an iteration anyway?
