CAPSTONE Project-using AGILE SCRUM methodology

Project Overview

During the course I acted as the lead project manager at Office Green LLC, a commercial landscaping company focused on interior plant design for offices, restaurants, and hotels. The Office Green market research team noticed a major shift to more workers setting up and working from a home office. They wanted to react fast to a potentially huge market opportunity and not lose revenue if businesses had less need for their previous office service. Instead of offering indoor landscaping designs for businesses, Office Green wants to find a way to capture this new market full of home offices .This shift to working from home came about suddenly, so Office Green didn't have any project plans to start from. They didn't have time to do a lot of prep work, but they wanted to maximize this opportunity before it was too late. To do this, Office Green assigned you to be the project manager of a scrappy new Agile team. Your goal is to deliver their new service, called Virtual Verde. 

By using an Agile approach to their project, Office Green was able to address high VUCA factors that were affecting their business. Instead of business slowly or quickly eroding due to market forces, Office Green embraced the changing market and remained flexible in how they approached their next project.

Overseeing the development and launch of Virtual Verde, Office Green's new product line. Virtual Verde’s mission is to make working from home more enjoyable by offering desk plants for home office use. New customers recently received the first batch of plants.

As a next step, your team had planned to introduce new product offerings to the Virtual Verde catalog—starting with Bonsai trees. However, a customer survey discovered that 70% of the new customers had difficulty caring for their plants. Many of the plants wilted and died within a month. This information inspired the team to develop new offerings and companion products to help new owners care for their plants.

You will work with your team to create user stories that will help them build solutions to address these customer needs, and add them to the Product Backlog. Your team has already added Bonsai tree user stories to the Backlog, but the new plant care stories have now become the top priority.

Along with the Product Owner and the team, you’ve created user stories and acceptance criteria for the Virtual Verde Product Backlog. Now you need to add effort estimations to each user story, which will help the team understand the amount of effort each task will take to complete. Once you have your estimations, the Product Owner can make any necessary adjustments to item priority in the Product Backlog. This information will help your team plan the upcoming Sprint. You will work with the Development Team to determine relative effort estimations for each Backlog item. Relative effort estimation isn’t just how much effort an item should take to complete. Instead, the Development Team evaluates the amount of effort each item takes compared to other items in the Product Backlog. 

You meet with the Product Owner and your team to decide which items from the Product Backlog to address in your first Sprint. To plan the Sprint, you will assign items from your Product Backlog to the Sprint Backlog. The total effort estimation (in Story Points) of the items you assign should match your team’s points capacity for a three-week Sprint. 

Roadmap

• Product backlog | User Stories | Acceptance Criteria | Check against INVEST criteria | Epic | Relative effort estimate | Sprint Backlog | Total effort estimate(Story points) | Releasable Increment | Minimum Viable Product | Sprint Retrospective | Velocity | Burndown Chart | Kanban | Asana | Value Roadmap | Change management | Agile coaching

Below is Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog with User Stories, Acceptance criteria, EPIC, Value, Estimate.