Nashua Scrum Club

Yesterday we had our kickoff meeting for the agile team that's building a donor cultivation and management capability for the Partnership for Successful living in Nashua.  The goal of the meeting was to have the team ready to begin work next week, which we accomplished.  I have to acknowledge the team for moving through a lot of material at a very rapid pace.  Learning to write User Stories, for example, is often a whole-day class.  My explanation lasted about 35 seconds, then we just started doing it, and it worked fine.  We're particularly fortunate to have Terri Landry on the team whose extensive agile background will be a big help with the team's learning process.

The team is comprised of IT professionals from the Nashua Scrum Club who have generously agreed to donate their time (Al Beaulieu, Linda Cataldo, Gerry Gan , Terri Landry, Bruce Magnuson, Rick McLaughlin, Lee Menegoni,  Sean Reilly and George Sluz) and Partnership for Successful Living Staff (Carolyn McLaughlin, Miles Pendry and Venessa Sarlo). 

Over the next four weeks, the length of the first iteration, the team will be focused on a few major areas:

• Getting basic infrastructure in place - email accounts, shared calendars, team work space, etc.
• Helping Vanessa, our Product Owner, write process-focused user stories for some of the most frequently used donation scenarios
• Learning Sage, the donor management software, by attempting to implement a simple process in a test database
• Learning what data is collected and used for donor management across all of the agencies that comprise the Partnership for Successful living