SRM Agile Practice: Team Portrait, Challenges, and Solutions

SRM Early Team Portrait

The team conducted an agile maturity assessment covering motivation, environment, product, agile process mechanisms, and engineering practices, resulting in the visual team portrait shown below.

Challenges and Solution Ideas

During actual project development, it was difficult to let users understand the overall product value; users typically only participated at the release stage, leading to last‑minute requirement changes when they realized the product did not meet their needs.

After adopting agile, user involvement increased, reducing mismatches at release. The SRM agile implementation focused on four practical areas.

1. Prioritize Product Backlog

Before each iteration, the product team refines the backlog so that each iteration delivers the most valuable features, which are also the users' primary concerns. Continuous delivery of high‑value items keeps users engaged and highlights project value.

2. Plan Iteration Schedule

A solid plan is half the battle, so the team places great emphasis on iteration planning meetings. During these meetings, the whole agile team determines priorities, story points, and the sprint goals, and clarifies each member’s responsibilities.

3. Hold Daily Stand‑up Meetings

Daily communication increases iteration transparency. Each stand‑up is kept short (under 10 minutes) and follows three questions: what I did yesterday to help achieve the sprint goal, what I will do today, and any impediments discovered.

I helped the team achieve the Sprint goal by doing X yesterday. Today I will do Y to help achieve the Sprint goal. I have identified impediment Z that may block the Sprint goal.

4. Conduct Retrospectives

After each iteration, the team reviews problems, improves processes, and refines the definition of “Done” to raise product quality. Two goals—improving functional specification quality and acceptance criteria—were set and achieved over three iterations.

SRM Agile Practice Members Coach: Du Weizhong Product Owner: Peng Hui Product: Wang Zongying, Meng Xianguo, Cao Fengxiang Scrum Master: Deng Yizhong Developers: Zhang Xuan, Zhang Jinling Article originally from “INFO Information Technology Department”.