![]() We’ll pick up again on Friday morning, and Caktus will also provide lunch that day. At 6pm, Caktus will provide a catered dinner for anyone who’d like to stay. ![]() On Thursday at 3pm, we’ll stop all client work, talk briefly as a large group once more about what we plan to work on, and then break off into teams (or individually) to begin working. It’ll work like this: On the Wednesday before the ShipIt day, we’ll have a brown bag lunch where folks are encouraged to get together, talk about what they’d like to work on, and begin forming teams for the following day. To kick things off, we’ll be trying out this new idea with one “beta” ShipIt day. Our hope is that ShipIt days will provide ample slack time that is free of direction to spend on building new apps, fixing bugs, improving internal processes, and contributing back to our communities. To play with new technologies and to build projects together. We want to create a work environment to foster creativity and scratch itches. We need to balance our creative outreach with client expectations. At the same time, we have client projects with set development schedules, and client satisfaction is very important. If we don’t, our skills will grow stale and that’s not good for us nor our clients. We need to devote resources to research, learning, and creative outreach. Thanks, and let us know your thoughts! PurposeĬaktus needs to innovate. We'll be posting further updates again after our first day's completion and will almost certainly evolve this policy as we go. ![]() Parts of the Guidelines have been shamelessly adapted from Atlassian's ShipIt Day FAQ and Six Feet Up's post on the outcome of one of their FedEx days. So, without further ado, here's a copy of our ShipIt Day Guidelines as of September 28, 2012. Much of the reasoning and purpose behind our decision to try out a ShipIt day can be found in the guidelines we put together describing the event. We got the idea from the book Drive by Daniel Pink, and it was also suggested independently by a number of team members. ShipIt Days, also known as FedEx Days, provide a time for the team to set aside what occupies us most days-building fantastic web applications using Python and Django for our wonderful clients-and pick up something new or scratch an itch that's been bugging us for awhile. If you would like to have a chat with me you can book a catchup online here.I'm delighted to write that last Friday, we announced we'll be trying our first "ShipIt Day" at Caktus in October. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on ship-it-days and moving to feature teams. Creating Great Teams (Sandy's awesome new book).Resources for running a self-selection event: whitepaper (pdf) Everything you need to know about FedEx DayĪll going well, the next stage would be using a self selection event to create a pilot feature team around a high value product area and using an urgent cross-component feature as the motivation for trying out the new team structure.Case studies: Xero, Atlassian (19 min video), Atlassian Ship-It Day in the wild.Convincing the execs: Why run a hack day? and 10 reasons you should run a FedEx day.If you like this idea, here are some resources for running a ship-it-day: I also suggested that allowing team members to volunteer to work in a team instead of being assigned to the team by a manger would build more buy-in for similar team structures in the future. ![]() It would give teams a try at self-organising across disciplines at the same time. The thinking behind using a ShipIt Day to ease the way to feature teams was that it would be a chance to try out out feature teams for a day in a safe context, and to give them a chance at running a team self-selection event. All going well, this could be followed by a pilot of one or two feature teams before any wider adoption. My experience participating in Hack Day at REA has stuck with me, and when a client asked recently how to introduce feature teams, I suggested they start with a ShipIt Day. When I think of companies that are successfully using many feature teams and have great culture I think of Atlassian and REA, and one of their most visible practices is their regular ShipIt Day aka Hack Day. One of the concerns that was raised in comments was how will team members react, in particular will the reduced emphasis on specialisation challenge team members sense of identity? Will the change be too fast or too disruptive? ![]() In my last post I wrote about Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) and how feature teams were a key element of the framework for me. ![]()
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