How to handle overflow work

One of the challenges that being Agile creates is the need for dedicated resources for each Scrum. It's wonderful when you're fully staffed, but can be a challenge when you aren't. One of the early programs we instituted in my current position was called User Experience Office Hours (OH). There are many different variations of OH, but this is how ours worked.

Each designer was asked to allocate two hours per week to Office Hours, recurring, on the same day. We booked a conference room every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 3 - 5, and assigned two designers and one usability analyst to the slot. We then put the slots on a public calendar and let anyone sign up.

For a 5% investment of a designers time each week we were able to cover not only the 30% of Scrum teams without a dedicate resource, but also other teams that needed some User Experience feedback (Marketing, Operations, Release Management).

Below is the Wiki page I created to outline the program.

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The Challenge

• User Experience is not able to formally support a number of SCRUMS and features
• UE doesn't want to ignore unsupported features
• Ease-of-use is important as a Company.com differentiator
• Consistency helps our users be more efficient and effective
• Small fixes can go a long way

Office Hours

• 2 hours, 3 times a week
• 2 x 60 minutes each day
• Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 3:00 – 5:00 – Halia Conference Room
• 2-3 UE team members
• Unsupported SCRUM teams get preference. Non-Scrum team are welcome (Tech Ops, Marketing, etc.)

What it is

• A way to vet designs and approaches with the UE Team.
• A forum for getting recommendations on implementation and best practices
• An opportunity for an heuristic evaluation
• A means to petition for usability testing or addition design resources

What it isn't

• Not a mechanism to get designs done for you from scratch
• Not a (preferred) way to get extra time with your allocated SCRUM UE resource
• Not a means to circumvent other existing design review processes
• Not a avenue to get icons or images produced

How it works
SIGN UP on the UE Office Hours calendar in Outlook at //Public Folders/All Public Folders/Development/UE Office Hours. Select the time you want and add yourself as an attendee. Enter your topic, and any links to relevant Wiki or Project Requirements pages. Note: Adding attachments to the invite has proved to be problematic in the past, so consider doing a "reply all" to the meeting instance.

Must Have: Before you come, please have the following items ready. This will maximize our effectiveness and your results:

• User Stories – To help us understand who is going to be using your feature, and how it will be used.
• Design objectives – How will your design match up to your use cases
  
• A design artifact (i.e., something visual for us to look at) – Any or all of the following are fine: paper sketches, Power Point, Excel, Visio, web page
  

Nice to Have:

• Page flow diagrams – A chart or sketch that shows how all your pages will fit together
• Similar examples in the UI – Have we done something similar before in the application?
• Comparative / Competitive examples – Has anyone else done something similar before?
• Customer feedback – This can include feature requests, emails, ideas, forum posts, sales input
• Testing results – Have we tested similar functionality before, and if so, what did we say?
• Prototypes – If you have an interactive example to work with, that's great.

Typical Agenda

1. Project review - <>
2. Artifact presentation – 10 min – Show us what you've brought and what you're thinking.
3. Discussion / other examples –35 min – Converse about the artifacts and objectives, and get some of our feedback.

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Here's the weekly update I send out on Mondays:

Hi everyone -

For any questions on Office Hours, please see our wiki page (http://wiki/Main/UEOfficeHours ), or drop me an email. Feel free to book a slot on our Public Calendar at Development > UE Office Hours. Just a reminder that we meet in Halia on the 8th floor.

Office Hours Schedule - Current
Tuesday: 4-5, Administering Groups/Queues/Territories (Adam Smith)
Wednesday: All Open
Thursday: All Open

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Office Hours Schedule - Last week (75% utilization)

Tuesday, 3-4 Project X (Bob)
Tuesday 4-5 Feature Backwards Compatibility (Susan, Eric )
Wednesday 3-4 Content in the Sidebar Search (Jane, Sally, Fred)
Wednesday 4-5 Open
Thursday 3- 5 UE Team Event

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The program worked so well, that it was adopted by our Documentation team, our Systems Test group, and our Architecture team.