using agile for on-boarding
DESCRIPTION
How a small company used Agile methodology to recruit and onboard 21 employees in only 8 weeksTRANSCRIPT
How a small company used Agile methodology to recruit and onboard 21 employees in only 8
weeks
IntroductionTechnical Writer / Instructional DesignerTechnical Publications Team Lead at
Perceptive InformaticsAgile Team MemberCertified Scrum Master
What I’ll tell you aboutWhy we needed to increase our staffPotential impedimentsThe EPIC user stories we created and
accomplishedHow we did the workWhat went wellWhat we need to improve
Why increase your staff?New, large-scale, multi-million dollar project
Add 6 – 8 major features12 months from start to releaseStart date of July 7th
Compete in the market space or go home
What we needed to accomplishRecruit 21 employees
Developers (8)DBA (1)SQA (8)Business Analysts (1)Technical Writers (3)
Begin recruiting on May 24Have all employees on-boarded and trained
by July 12
Problems to be solvedNo existing on-boarding processNo formal new hire training programInefficient recruiting processNo dedicated training departmentNo workstations, phones, or computers
Use Agile!
Our Epic storiesRecruit and hire new employeesPrepare facilities
WorkstationsPhonesHardwareSoftware
Create and administer a training programOverallDepartmental
The Teams
Recruit new employeesPrepare facilitiesCreate a training
programAdminister training
Managers / Recruiting Agency
ITHR / Technical PublicationsSMEs
Product Owner: Director of HR
How we did the work
Portal & process for reviewing resumesSchedule for interviewsStandard tests & interview questions
Recruiting New Employees
How we did the work
Corporate / industry overviewProduct overviewIT / Systems overviewAgile methodology / RallyRole-specific
Creating & administering a training program
How we did the work
WorkstationPhoneHardwareSoftwareNetwork access
Preparing Facilities
What we did wellRecruitment
19 new hires ready by the starting dateOnly 2 employees were not retained after the
90-day mark due to performanceCreating & administering training
Enthusiastic response from the new hiresNew hires came up-to-speed very quicklyReusable for future new hires
What we can do betterThe area hardest hit was IT:
Ability for new hires to access systems was sketchyComputers not available for new hires after the
orientation periodNo one considered impact of increased traffic on
servers and networkTeam Leads were not available to answer
questions due to meetings, etc.
What we can do betterSolution: New servers were ordered after the
first wave of new hires; however it took 6 weeks to get them in place
No one considered impact of increased traffic on servers and network
Solution: New servers were ordered after the first wave of new hires