Piotr Woloszyn

I’ve been performing a small experiment lately and wanted to share some results.

My girlfriend is pursuing chartered accountant qualification. In order to qualify as an ACCA member, one has to complete 14 exams. The length of time it takes to qualify depends on the student as the course is designed to be flexible. Each year there are two examination session and one can sit up to four papers per session. With just couple of exams, it makes substantial amount to read, digest, revise, rehearse, to be able to pass. But in the same time it is pretty predictable. If you put this much of effort you can expect particular result. So, the problem can be defined as:

with a limited time on hands, how to score >= 51% for each of the exams one attempts to pass.

I could see her struggle. She knew what she has to do but she didn’t know if with current time constraints it is durable. She didn’t know if she will be able to prepare well enough for all the papers, or maybe drop an exam to give more time to other exams. What was needed is a simple plan with estimation put in realistic time frame. I decided to step in and help organize it using agile planning tool which I’ve been using for last two years: ScrumWorks. I’m trying to be quite serious here but I can see glimpses of smile appearing on faces of many people reading it now. I understand and it would be quite amusing for me as well. But hey, there is no such thing which we can’t do to entertain other people!

We started our planning with creating user stories. It would map directly to modules in each paper. The size of each user story would be the same to start with. Then each user story would be tasked out: each module requires particular amount of time allocated to reading, making exercises, revising. On the top of that there was time allocated to mock exams and wide spectrum revising. Each of the tasks can be quite well estimated. What’s unusual here is that all the user stories were tasked out up front and not on weekly iteration planning. In this case it was possible and needed as the deadline is fixed and domain well understood. After this agile planning exercise we ended up with very clear backlog. We knew what it takes to pass exam. The second part of this was allocating user stories with tasks to particular weekly iterations. It was easy enough just to divide workload in equal batches and reserve some time in last two weeks for this known-unknowns which always appear before release.

It’s her fifth iteration now. Except the initial introduction of the process I haven’t been interfering much. Each Sunday she was re-planning to accommodate real velocity, adding, removing or changing tasks, re-prioritizing. I have to say that she loves Scrumworks! It is a very simple tool which just does the job. Especially drag-and-drop re-planning and burn down charts she found very handy and useful.

So, what has changed since introducing this process? First advantage is improved visibility of progress which in very honest and direct way shows if one is doomed or not. It helps to make difficult decisions. With weekly iterations it helps to maintain a high average focus and saves a lot of stress being generated by not knowing if we are behind or ahead with preparations. I recon I will have to wait till exams to see how well the geeky project management can help “an average Joe”.

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