The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

Check out what this guy had to endure to simply cancel his AOL subscription. Wow.

Warren Buffett is donating his
fortune to five charities. Buffett will begin donating the bulk of his $42
billion beginning next month to the following charities (click each link to
read his letter to the foundation):

• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation
• Howard G. Buffett Foundation
• The Susan A. Buffett Foundation
• NoVo Foundation

I’m happy to see a large portion going to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They’re doing a lot of great things from reducing poverty to bringing technology to those who may otherwise never have access. Awesome.

Great ad campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi for Papa John’s Pizza.

We launched the limited beta last Tuesday and feedback is continuing
to roll in from participants. We’ve ended up with a total of 386 beta users - Thanks everyone!
This is a small portion of our current clients who are diving in and testing the
new user interface. Beta testers have the ability to switch back-and-forth between
the old and new UI as they take it for a test drive.

Our primary goal for the beta is to get feedback on the
overall impression of the new UI and ensure the software is in fact, easier to
use.  We’re receiving a lot of great feedback and most seem to love the changes we’ve made. One of the most striking changes is the header. Our old UI contained a total of 11
tabs. The re-designed UI contains only 4 tabs with sub-navigation for
each. Here’s
a look at the old and new headers (note the slogan change as well):

Today we launched the limited beta of IntelliContact v4.0.
We’re gearing up for the full launch on August 1^st. We had a little
over 360 people sign up for the beta, which runs through June 30^th.
We are rapidly receiving feedback on the re-designed interface! It’s amazing. I’ll
keep everyone posted on the progress as we move closer to the launch of v4.0 on
August 1^st.

We’ve been re-designing our user interface since January and
we’ve tried some new things with this project, notably our development process.
In the past we had meetings, decided what we wanted to build and how it should
work and an in-depth requirements document was written. While it sounded good
in theory and looked quite nice on paper, it was never that easy and efficient
getting from point A to point B. The who, what, where, and when was
challenging. It was challenging as there was no understanding of who could
provide feedback when, who made the decision of what was implemented, and it
was tough to know where the developers were in the development process. I am in marketing and looked at the process
from the outside. It was very tough to see how far along development had gotten
on a feature that I was following. So with the design of the new interface our
development team decided to implement a different development process called Scrum.

I had never heard of it, but I’m loving it. Scrum changed
things quite a bit, but all for the better. Using Scrum our development process
now works like this:

• Anyone in the organization can submit feature requests via user stories.

• These user stories are then placed into a product backlog that is prioritized by a product manager.

• A meeting is then held where items (user stories) on the list are brought up for discussion, clarification, and finalization of rank based on what the team feels is of the greatest and least priority. Anyone within the organization can attend these meetings and contribute.

• Once this meeting is adjourned (typically a 4-5 hour meeting) the development team is prepared to begin work on these items.

• The development team works in 30 day sprints. So all items on the list must be completed in the 30 day sprint.

• Each morning the development team has their daily scrum meeting where they discuss what was accomplished the day before and what they plan to complete for that day. Anyone outside of development can attend these daily meetings to stay up to date on what is currently under development, however no outside input can be given as all topics, decisions, and priorities were agreed upon in the meeting prior to the sprint, known as the Sprint Planning Meeting.

• The day in which the sprint ends is a set day and does not change. What changes as the last day of the sprint approaches is how certain items are implemented. For instance, if it will take an extra three days add a feature that is more “cool” than necessary the “cool” feature must wait until the next sprint if the sprint deadline is not met.
      
• At the conclusion of the sprint there is a Sprint Review Meeting in which each developer presents their work completed during the last sprint. This meeting, like the Sprint Planning Meeting, is open to anyone within the organization.
      

Here’s a diagram of the process:

As far as quality assurance, we have integrated into the
system and the QA Engineer works closely with the development team throughout
the process.

It has been an interesting transition for the entire company
as it has allowed everyone to be involved in the development process while
maintaining order and keeping a clear goal in mind.

Do you currently use Scrum?
If so, share your experience with us.

If you’d like to learn more about Scrum, check out the
following links:

• Control Chaos
• Mountain Goat Software
• Wikipedia

I’d like to extend a special thanks to Paul, Mike, Colin,
and Tyme for accepting BrandonMilford.com into the 9rules Network. Thanks gang! I’m truly
honored. There were 700 submissions for Round 4 and 111 were chosen. Congratulations to all the new members.

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