Agile Bay Area #LNDMeetup Mindmap

I’ve been interested in process, so I attended this month’s Bay Area Learning Design Meetup that showcased LinkedIn’s work on Agile using Scrum for learning design. It was very nice of them to share the specifics of their process, and while there were more details than time permitted to cover, it was a great beginning to understand the differences.

Basically, a backlog is kept of potential new projects.  They’re prioritized and a subset is chosen as the basis of the sprint and put on the board.  Then for two weeks they work on hitting the elements on the board, with a daily standup meeting to present where they’re at and synchronize.  At the end they demo to the stakeholders and reflect.  As part of the reflection, they’re supposed to change something for the next iteration.

There’re different roles: a project owner who’s the ‘client’ in a sense (and a relation to who may be the end client).  There is a Scrum master who’s responsible for facilitating the group through the steps, and then the team, which should be small but at least represent all the necessary roles to execute whatever is being accomplished.

When I asked about scope, they said that they’ve found they can do about 100 story points (which are empirical) in a sprint, and they may distribute that across some elearning, some job aids, whatever.  They didn’t seem too eager to try to quantify that relative to other known metrics, and I understand it’s hard, particularly in the time they had.  Here’s the Mindmap:

Allen Interactions also discussed their SAM project (which I know and like), but the mind map didn’t match too well to their usual diagram (only briefly shown at the end), and I ran out of time trying to remedy. It’s better just to look at the diagram ;).