INCI Beauty application

[Areski]

Hello

As part of my end-of-training project, I must establish a fictional team to improve the functions and user experience of the INCI Beauty app (similar to YUKA and Think Dirty). As a multimedia project manager and UX/UI lead, I have 3 developers to work with me. We use the Scrum method and rely on task management tools such as Jira or Trello, Notion and Figma for UX/UI, and Data.AI for data. I am not sure of the tools and languages used to develop this existing app for iOS and Android. Could you give me your opinion on my team and the project management approach I have taken, is it logical for this type of project?
Thank you.

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Areski and welcome to the Community!

To be perfectly open and honest, what you describe above does not resonate like a project management approach to me. But having said that, you describe most of the things involved to run it, which is a very decent plus!

Running your project does involve people, practices and tools. You described your team (👍), indicate that you would use scrum (👍) as a methodology and listed your toolset (👍). To answer your question if this is a good package for your project, the key is to answer why you made all these choices. If you can pull that off, I would say you're on the right track.

Scrum as a methodology is a well known approach for development teams. It implies that you plan your work in 2-week iterations (sprints). Your developers should have enough of clearly specified work on their plate when the sprint starts and while they deliver the features, your functional people should make sure that enough work is ready to picked up when the next sprint is about to start. At the end of the sprint, the team demoes what has been developed and a retrospective takes place to discuss improvements to the way the team is working. Changes are then implemented on a regular basis.

To support your planning, Jira Software is the best tool since it supports scrum's sprint planning out of the box. But Trello may have its place as well to support ideation, brainstorms and other, more free-form work. You may want to add Confluence to your stack as well for documentation, collaboration and stuff like meeting notes

Finally, to assess whether scrum is the right approach depends on the nature of your project. You mention this is a UI/UX improvement project. If the UI of the application is so terrible that you are facing a 6 month + project with many steps, then it would be worth planning sprints for it. If it will be completed in 2 or 3 weeks, then you immediately see how it's not even worth taking the effort to start planning sprints for it. Unless - and this is what usually happens in organizations - the project is one of many projects you are addressing with the same team.

Hope this helps! And all the best with your project!

[Areski]

Thank you for your detailed response which will be very useful. I may be repeating myself, but this is a fictional project even though the application really exists, it is to pass my UX UI certification and in the end I would not be PM or PO but only UX. Regarding the retroplanning, if the project lasts 6 months, do you advise me to do a retro once a month or more? Also, are the dailys in the beginning or end of the sprint? And last question, should I incorporate the retrospectives in the roadmap or a Gantt chart?

Thank you

Areski

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Areski,

A retrospective - if you play scrum by the book - is held at the end of every sprint. So, considering a traditional sprint is a 2-weekly iteration, that implies you have a retro every 2 weeks.

A daily (standup) - as the name suggests - takes place every day. 

And on your final question about adding the retrospectives to the roadmap: no, don't. Your agile ceremonies are not something you deliver to your product / customer, they are just supporting activities to make your team run smoothly. 

[Areski]

Thank you for the response, but I don't fully understand it. Are daily, weekly or retrospectives writer somewhere, like in a schedule if it's not a roadmap?

Have a nice weekend. 

[Walter Buggenhout]

These are all ceremonies, but you can call them meetings if you like. In a retrospective, you come together with your whole team to discuss how the last sprint went, in an attempt to learn lessons from what went good, not so good or even terribly wrong during the sprint.

In a daily standup, you get the team together (usually every morning) for a quick check-in how everybody is progressing. Classical questions everybody answers during that meeting are:

• what did you work on yesterday?
• what do you plan to work on today?
• is there anything you're stuck with?

A daily standup is supposed to be short. If any deeper issues pop up that require more detailed discussion, that should be addressed in a dedicated discussion afterwards.

It is pretty common to make notes of a retrospective, as the idea is to define actions you should take as a team to improve. If you are going to use Jira for tracking the work in your sprint, it is possible to create a retrospective report in a linked Confluence instance from within Jira when you complete a sprint.

For a bit of inspiration about retrospective, you may want to check out the retrospective play from the Atlassian Team Playbook.

[Areski]

Hi

Thanks again for all the information you share. It allows me to project myself even if my project is fictive. I don't know Confluence, I'll look at how it works and if it's not too challenging to use I'll integrate this tool, otherwise I'll talk about it in a theoretical way during my project pitch.