Increasing Business and Technology Throughput

I'm currently the project manager for a global, content management implementation and I've been working with a colleague, Raul Pavon, on how to effectively communicate/colloborate with a team of developers and subject matter experts scattered across the globe and in almost every timezone.

One requirement for this project from the executive sponsor was ensuring high degrees of visibility into project progress. We're applying a number of agile principles to support this goal but we were struggling on how best to 'scrum' on the goals we're trying to accomplish during each sprint. The challenge is that many of the team members are more than 8 hours out of alignment in terms of working hours, which made it logistically difficult to get everyone together at the same time. It occurred to me that Twitter might be a useful mechanism to understand what team members were working on and any roadblocks/issues they had encountered. I shared this idea with Raul who rapidly embraced it and we began to explore how to best leverage the tool.

One aspect Raul immediately identified was that this moved the daily scrum process into a highly collaborative, real-time model that freed itself of the contraint of gathering a team together every 24 hours to update on progress. Using Twitter, the same scrum updates are being provided without the artificial delay of getting people together in a room and it's also much easier to extend this to a global context. Raul, who is about to get his Black Belt in 6 Sigma coined the term "Lean Scrumming" for what we were doing. We also discussed how this technique might also support a 'swarm' theory where the project team begins to form an collective awareness of group progress and adapts to priorities and obstacles by responding together (similar to a swarm of bees or school of fish moving in tight formation but in a fluid and adaptive direction).

It's early in our experience with this technique but we wanted to share some initial experiences and see if we can harness perspectives/comments from other members of the community. Some suggestions on what we've learned so far:

• Setup: Twitter itself took a few attempts to setup. It's a good practice to have someone guide each team member on how to configure their cell phone to receive the Twitter text messages. You also need to make sure each member has an SMS enabled phone (I doubt you can even buy phones without that feature these days) and a Text Messaging plan.
• Establish guidelines on what to send as an update. We're focusing on only project related tasks (we decided that knowing when someone goes to lunch or for a coffee wasn't that important) and issues/problems. This is a bit different from the social interaction aspect of these tools.
• Update regularly, every 2-4 hours is useful to keep an active pulse to the project.

Some things we wish Twitter had:

• More integration with task lists/project management tools. It would be nice if a team member could simply highlight a task in their Outlook task list and it would send a Twitter update.
• Contact groups. Currently you need to manually add someone in order to follow them, having a list so you can filter the types of messages would be useful.
• Intranet application. A version that ran inside a corporate firewall and authenticated to a corporate directory would be a big plus for wider corporate usage.

We'll keep more posts coming on our experience and feel free to share comments and perspectives.