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This case study describes how a small team of content managers and strategists is experimenting with agile techniques and lean principles to run the business and support strategic programs at eBay. According to Michael B Jones who presented the slides at the Lean IT Summit 2013: "inspired by the developers we partner with, we've picked methods and techniques from agile, scrum and lean. We have tried and adjusted our set up over a period of four months and are about to upgrade our set-up technically and try scaling the approach to a geographically dispersed team". Discover more Lean IT case studies on www.lean-it-summit.com
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Copyright © Institut Lean France 2013
3 & 4 October, 2013 Paris, France
European Lean IT Summit 2013
Lean & Agile digital content Michael B Jones - eBay
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT
MICHAEL JONES
Senior Manager, Digital Content October 3, 2013
A COUPLE OF WORDS ON CONTENT AT EBAY This case study describes how a small team of content managers and strategists is
experimenting with agile techniques and lean principles to run the business and
support strategic programs at eBay. Inspired by the developers we partner with,
we've picked methods and techniques from agile, scrum and lean. We have tried
and adjusted our set up over a period of four months and are about to upgrade our
set-up technically and try scaling the approach to a geographically dispersed team.
WHAT IS CONTENT AT EBAY? WHAT DOES IT DO?
MULTIPLE FORMATS & TYPES:
TEXT, VIDEO, IMAGES, AUDIO
UI, HELP, MARKETING, CS, EMAIL
COMMUNICATES TRUST
MAKES EBAY FEEL LOCAL
MULTIPLE CUSTOMER USES:
SUPPORTS USERS IN
ACHIEVING THEIR TASKS A MEANS OF
CONNECTING WITH OUR
CUSTOMERS TO
INFORM, RE-ASSURE,
ENGAGE AND INSPIRE.
-------------------------------------
A WAY OF
DIFFERENTIATING US
FROM OUR
COMPETITORS
GLOBAL AND LOCAL:
COMBINES SCALABILITY OF
GLOBAL PLATFORM WITH
LOCAL FEEL
COLLECTIVELY:
OUR LARGEST CUSTOMER
TOUCHPOINT
MULTIPLE CONTRIBUTIONS:
A HYGIENE FACTOR, A BUSINESS
ASSET, A DIFFERENTIATOR
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 4
VISION: TO ENABLE COMMERCE BY CREATING
CONTENT CUSTOMERS LOVE
MISSION:
To produce personalised, engaging content.
In multiple formats and multiple languages.
That works hard on all devices and platforms.
That differentiates us …
… at scale, globally.
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 5
THE TEAM
• We are a small local team within a large global organisation.
• We are a support function evolving into a strategic one. Keeping the lights on by fixing bugs, maintaining
existing assets. Adding value to customers by creating new assets.
• Content work is knowledge work – decision making and highly skilled execution (parallels to coding)
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 6
WHY & HOW WE TRIED AGILE There are many other teams at eBay who are more advanced in using
agile/scrum and lean startup principles, but for product management &
development.
We are trying to learn from them and find the right mix for our kind of
knowledge work.
REASONS FOR EXPERIMENTING
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 8
• Our previous set up (Outlook & Sharepoint) at breaking point –
causing errors and confusion.
• Team felt overwhelmed, didn't know what each other is working
on.
• No overview of requests and projects - making planning,
prioritisation, expectation setting, progress tracking hard.
• Inspired by hearing about Oobeya, A3 and lean leadership
principles (particularly focus on the vital few; visual & frequent
stand up reviews; standardisation, stability & Gemba
management)
• Lean Startup book has popularised lean principles in 'our' world,
meaning greater acceptance and understanding of trying this
out.
NOTES FROM OUR AGILE DIARY…
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 9
WEEK 1: 3.06.2013
“Difficult first attempt at agile planning. Took 90 mins to assess just 4
user stories. Struggling to find right balance btw. Some of the
discussion felt like micromanagement. All of us outside our comfort
zone. Full range of responses from very keen to reluctant.”
(WEEK of 13.06.2013
All of team involved in an off site conference for most of week, so
sprint was skipped.)
WEEK 2: 20.06.2013
"Our second ‘agile’ week – better progress on planning and getting
an overview by post-its on our windows. We’ve still got a way to go
with this, but already we have a better overview of the (planned)
activities.”
NOTES FROM OUR AGILE DIARY…
PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE 10
WEEK 3: 27.06.2013
"Our third ‘agile’ week. Managing to have daily standups (shortest one was 10 minutes, longest ran to an
hour, so there is some work to do on tightening them up!). It feels like we are uncovering issues more quickly
than before and are more efficiently sharing what we are all working on.“
WEEK 4: 04.07.2013
"Our fourth ‘agile’ week. Daily standups not so regular this week. Realising that this is more than just another
planning methodology – it is actually a fundamental shift in how we think about our work and its purpose. It
is about learning and iterating in fast cycles – the plan-do-check-act cycle. It is about transparency and
making visible what is often ‘hidden’ in our inboxes."
WEEK 5: 12.07.2013
"Not much to report on the agile front this week, other than we are progressing and starting to build up a
good rhythm. That will surely be tested as many of the team are out over the coming weeks (including me,
starting Monday)."
WEEKS 6, 7 & 8
Agile habits irregular whilst we had reduced team coverage over school holidays.
NOTES FROM OUR AGILE DIARY…
PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE 11
WEEK 9: 09.08.2013
“Coming back from vacation, it was a bit of an effort to get the agile practices going again. This showed me that the new ‘habits’ are not fully established yet and need continued discipline.”
WEEK 10: 15.08.2013
“Agreed with team experiment with longer 2 week sprints. This should allow us to focus planning and tracking activities more on the big rocks, following the insight that it is not possible or necessary for us to track all ‘business as usual’ deliverables. First one of the longer sprints starts Monday 19th”
WEEK 11: 22.08.2013
“We started the first of our two week ‘sprints’ on Monday. So far, so good.”
WEEK 12: 30.08.2013
“Observations from our first two-week sprint – for the Bigfoot activities, it worked. […] some of the other activities slipped […]. In part this was because […] we were lax in estimating the time effort for the deliverables. […] Another observation was that our planning board only contained a fraction of the actual work done by the team – telling us that we again need to be more diligent about scanning our inboxes and other channels for incoming work and ensuring that this is fed into the planning..”
SUMMARY OF APPROACH
PRESENTATION TITLE GOES HERE 12
• Made work visible - Low-tech solutions to try methods quickly -
sticky notes & whiteboards.
– We took it too far - rolled back when we realised that
transferring an xls to the window and back again was just
adding to the workload!
• User stories to define deliverables
• Started with 1 week sprints, then extended to 2 weeks to
lessen the meeting load (planning & retros).
• Meeting cycle - planning / daily standups / retrospective
• Now booking around 40% of teams' available time. (Goal is to
get to 70%)
WHAT’S NEXT
There’s no going back for us, but this is still early days and we expect to
iterate the processes regularly as we scale the approach.
NEXT STEPS
• Scale to the other EU teams - geographically dispersed, so
we'll to adapt methods
• Considering an experiment with Kanban
• Upgrade from post-its to JIRA + Greenhopper, differentiated
swim lanes for bugs, BAU & projects
• More learning from the teams around us & external
• Build out tracking and reporting in JIRA to capture customer
impact, level of effort & stakeholder survey
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 14
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 15
WHAT WE LEARNT
• Dailies & retros help us manage and measure our work – i.e. how well we scoped different types of tasks; seeing problem processes which we then tackled by standardization.
• We’re able to evaluate bandwidth more realistically – we observed reduction in overtime (although other factors also played a role)
• Has enabled easier reporting (up & out); aiding prioritisation, stakeholder management and team transparency.
• We're still struggling with task estimation; still too much debate in planning and dailies; haven’t nailed format for our ‘user stories’
• Making the team's work visible meant everyone knew what each other is working on
• Pragmatically & quickly cherry picking methods and diving in with lo-fi tools important to accelerate change process
• It’s crucial to build habits & iterate
THANK YOU
Any questions or feedback very welcome!
LEAN & AGILE FOR CONTENT 17
Q&A
CONTACT
EMAIL: [email protected]
LINKEDIN: http://de.linkedin.com/in/michaelbjones/
TWITTER: @MikeJonesBerlin
Copyright © Institut Lean France 2013
3 & 4 October, 2013 Paris, France
More Lean IT videos and presentations on www.lean-it-summit.com
