Solving process pain with awesomeness

Adaptavist ran its second ShipIt event in December with teams pitting their wits against a variety of "process pains" internal and external to the business. With just 24 hours to design and build a solution, ShipIt helps bring focus and action to improving the business runs. You can watch the video here.

A wide range of processes and pains

Nine teams formed with the emphasis on giving people the opportunity to take a different role that their day job. The teams focused on a range of areas including:

• Client engagements (develop tools to improve migration across JIRA and Confluence, for example)
• Marketing (create new videos for our add-ons)
• Internal processes (improve meeting management, increasing the integration between back office systems)
• Housekeeping (reduce the number of unresolved issues in our 10-year old JIRA instance) and
• Revisiting existing processes (improve the document review process).

Why look at process pain?

Some projects were about solving a problem for the first time, some were about replacing workarounds with more robust solutions and some took the opportunity to take a fresh look at how we do things. All of them were based on a business need, keeping that firmly in mind whilst looking at how technology and tools could be applied to improve a process. Most of the projects involved writing code or integrating applications (or both) but the real benefits were to be found in looking at what was needed without getting stymied by "how we usually do things".

In our experience, the vast majority of organisations have a range of process pains from niggles to blockers. ShipIt is increasingly being used at Adaptavist as a way of taking a time out on business as usual and enabling change in how we work internally and externally.

What we learned

A fundamental part of the ShipIt process is the retrospective taking the chance to immediately review and document the event and identify what worked well and what we could do better next time.

It's fair to say that the overwhelming sentiment was positive with team members getting a better appreciation for the skills, experiences and contributions of other Adaptavists that they haven't necessarily worked closely with before. We were also able to use the awesomeness of the Adaptavist team to solve some real process pains in the business.

The "what could we improve" comments focused on how to get more learning from the process (allocate more time for Q&A) and how we can capture and plan projects on an ongoing basis (rather than just in the run-up to a ShipIt). Oh, and people wanted prizes for the best projects.

Below is a video summary of ShipIt II. Thanks to everyone who took part. Roll on ShipIt III.