6. Start Date
A boss tells an <insert ethnicity, gender, age group, or job role> applicant, "I'll give you $8 an hour, starting today, and in three months, I'll raise it to $10 an hour. So, when would you like to start?"He/she replies: "In three months."
MENTAL NOTE: Jokes are funnier when you don’t have to be Politically Correct!
We’ll take a break from sexy again to talk about starting projects. While finishing projects is critical, it’s also important that we understand how to start them.
Think back to your last few projects. Do you know when they started? Was there an event that happened where the whole team was certain that the project was approved and everyone was working on getting it done? Was there an official kickoff of sorts? Or was it kind of a nebulous thing that was handed down and you’re now just working on it because it failed before and you were to breathe new life into it?
It’s pretty difficult to know how long a team has been working on a project if they didn’t set off on it together and note the date that it kicked off.
This kickoff event doesn’t have to have an F-16 flyover, the Michigan Marching Band, or a starting gun. (whoa, would it be cool though!) Our usual stance is that the team should agree when the project is starting and take off. If you want to have a kickoff ceremony, cool. It’s a good practice to review the Inception Deck, talk about roles of people on the team, and create an initial backlog when you’re starting the project. You may also want to agree on a workflow to start, whether you are going to use a commitment based methodology like Scrum or more of a flow based system like Kanban.
I have found that whatever methodology you pick, it’s a good idea to have the team agree on the rules for moving things from one column to another. For that matter, the team should talk about other rules they want to abide by as well. I have included some of the rules that the team formerly known as Iron Shrimp team used. (Click to make bigger.)
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