Not to be confused with Design Sprints, a Sprint here at T R I M refers to our timeboxed work week. Each week our consultants are on sprint from Monday through Thursday. There’s a brief stand up meeting each morning where we take turns sharing what we worked on the day before, what we’re working on that day, and whether or not we have any blockers. A blocker is simply anything that is preventing you from getting your work done, like missing assets or an unclear path forward, for example. After stand ups on Monday and Tuesday, we roll up our sleeves and get right to work. Wednesday and Thursday we have some additional programming
On Wednesdays we have Inspo Day after stand ups. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, a time for team members to share inspiring things they’ve discovered in the tech space that week. On Thursdays a team member will put together a short training presentation to share with the rest of the team. These trainings are brief and high-level but they are a great way for our different departments to get more familiart with the others’ skillsets. Product designers sit in on developer trainings and vice versa. The rest of the week is devoted to production.
With the sprint concluding at the end of the day Thursday, Fridays are dedicated to sprint planning for the following week, demoing our work for Product Owners, investment time, and retrospective. Investment time is where we sharpen our skillset. To ensure that we’re always at the top of our game, we build this time into the work week for our consultants to learn new things and tinker. Retrospective happens at the end of the day on Friday and it’s a time for us to celebrate our wins from the week and talk through what could have gone better. What we identify as needing improvement becomes an action item for the following weeks.
With all of the above in mind, we expect each of our consultants’ output to be no less than 20 billable hours of high quality work each week. We do not bill for daily meeting time, extracurriculars, our Friday demo and planning time, nor do we bill for our weekly retrospective. Our sprint schedule has been instrumental for us in shipping many successful products over the years for our product owners. If you’d like to work together and experience our sprint process first hand, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a line here and we’ll get the ball rolling. Let’s build something great.
