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Salesforce Agile Accelerator Meetup

Built on force.com platform this tool has the ability to integrate with your Salesforce Apps, Service cloud data, Sales Cloud data, Objects etc. Because this tool lives in Salesforce, it becomes very convenient to track the Sprint work and get real time updates. Visually appealing graphs, Salesforce reports and dashboard, Chatter and User friendly UI makes this tool stand out in the market compared to its competitors. 

Use Case:

1-2-3 SFDC would like to track Sprint work for the Penguin Team. Given below are the roles for the Team Members.

Team Member: Role

1. Rico Penguin: BSA
2. Skipper Penguin: QA Engineer
3. Kowalski Penguin: Developer
4. Mason Penguin: Scrum Master
5. Mort Penguin: Product Owner
6. Sfdc Beginner: Business Owner 

Salesforce Login:

It is important that all the team members must have Salesforce Login to get started with Salesforce agile Accelerator.

Salesforce Developer Sandbox

Create your own Salesforce Developer Sandbox

https://developer.salesforce.com/signup

AppExchange:

Go to Salesforce AppExchange and download Salesforce Agile Accelerator

 https://appexchange.salesforce.com/  

Users:

Create your team in the Salesforce. Users can belong to any profile or roles. Salesforce Agile Accelerator does not require users to below to a particular role or profile. 

Security:

Users can be assigned to admin or user permission set. Generally Scrum Master is admin and team members are assigned user permission set.

Create your Team

Give unique name to your Team and specify the Story Points.  Story Points define the level of efforts required to work on a user story. This can be either Tshirt size of Small, Medium, and Large or a series of numbers that have hours or days assigned to them. 

Allocation (%) defines availability of your team member for this Sprint. If the team member is out of office for one day then the allocation would be 90%. 

Product Tag:

Product Tags are used to arrange or categorize your work. For example if your team is working on diverse projects Sales, Marketing, Tele business, Support. Then create product tags to categorize the work. 

Assignment Rule:

When a work is created it automatically gets assigned to the assignee that is defined in the assignment rule.  As shown below click on the << to update the assignment rule. 

Sprints:

This tab provides the details of the current Sprint as well as the previous Sprints - Start Date, End Date and the remaining days for the Sprint to be closed. 

Team dependency:

User stories or work that has dependency on other teams can be defined here. 

Salesforce Agile Accelerator Q & A

Q1: We have users who do not work in Salesforce or who are non-Salesforce users. Do we have to purchase additional Salesforce licenses?

It is must for all the users to have access to Salesforce in order to use this tool. Non Salesforce users will have to be created in Salesforce. If you can manage using developer Sandbox than I don’t see any reason to purchase additional licenses.

Q2: Ours is a developer team and we are currently using GITHUB to track our Sprint work. With Git hub we can track the code changes. Does Salesforce Agile accelerator provide this ability?

I am not sure. I am still exploring this tool and in this process, I haven’t found this feature in Agile Accelerator yet.

Q3: Do we have the ability to change the Burn down chart from hours to Story Points?

I am not sure although, I know there are standard reports provided by Salesforce for agile accelerator that has burn down chart reports and these can be customized using filters.

Q4: When a Task is assigned to a team Member does the team member receive any notifications?

Yes, also chatter provides real time updates like XYZ task has been assigned to “Rico”. You can also customize chatter for additional features.

Q5: Our team only works on defects, how can we define this work?

Yes this is possible by creating record type on work object. For example- you can create User story, Bugs, Defects, Projects, enhancements etc.

Q6: If I assign more work to a team member does that reflect in chart? And if the team member completes that task in half the time then what happens?

Burn down chart  shows the current number of hours assigned to a team member and the availability is shown with the blue color. Take an example that Rico has been assigned 40 hours of work and he is available to take 20 hours of more work. Now Rico finishes a 10 hours of task in 5 hours. Then his assigned work shows 35 hours and availability updates to 25.v

Salesforce Agile Accelerator - Part 1

Hands on with Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Product Tags

Systematically arrange your work by classifying them into catalog/categories using Product Tags. Take an example that as a business analyst you are working on a project that impacts multiple departments like Sales, Support, Tele business, Marketing etc. Team members will be divided to work on each areas. To differentiate your work and help the team to identify the work from the product backlog you can use unique product tags for each category. 

Create your Product Tags:

 While creating Teams you can directly type Product tag. Once you type the name and save the Teams form it will automatically save the name under “Product Tags” Tab.

I tried assigning a new product tag for an existing team which already has a product tag assigned. I received following error which means that Salesforce Agile Accelerator does not allow members outside the team to make any changes to the team once the team has an existing active product tag.

  

Click on the Product Tag to explore more options

Assignment Rule for Product Tags:

Assignment Rule will automate the work assignment for the teams based on the product tag. This may sound familiar like creating assignment rules for Leads in salesforce, the concept is very similar although creating assignment rules for Product tags is different and much easier in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Navigation:

Go to Product Tags tab-> click on the product tag-> click on the <<  and this should open a new window. If you would like to create a new Assignment rule then click on “Create New Button”

Please Note: Create New Button will not be visible for you, if you donot belong to a team that has the product tag assigned. For example I am logged in as SFDC Beginner.  I don’t see “Create New” option for product tags “1-2-3 Marketing Team” because I am not part of either the team assigned to the product tag. 

“Create New” button  is visible for “Tele business” product tag, because I am part of this team. 

For example, in 1-2-3 sfdc all the Production P1/High Priority issues should be assigned to a senior member of the team “Rico Penguin”.  

Assignment Rule:

Click on create new assignment rule, and fill the user names for assignee, product owner, followers etc..

Required fields to save the assignment rule are product owner and assignee. Once you hit save then you can customize the assignment rule with more options. 

Click edit on the assignment rule and observe the page. To make the work assignment more manageable, Salesforce has added more options to the assignment rule like who will be the assignee if the severity of the ticket/ user story is 1, 2 ,3 etc.

 

Salesforce Agile accelerator will prompt you to choose the team if you belong to more than one team.

Assignment rule concept is very similar to few ticket management applications, for example ‘Service Now”. In this application if an Incident is submitted with P1 Category the ticket is automatically assigned to the department and a notification is sent to higher management. Similarly in Salesforce Agile Accelerator when a work that belongs to this product tag will have severity 1 it will automatically assign it to the defined assignee and will send real time updates to the followers.

In the next post we will learn how to create Sprints in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

Thank you once again for visiting my blog.

Hands on with Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Accelerate your Teams growth with Salesforce Agile Accelerator. Multiple teams and departments including business users and stakeholders can use this tool to make the work visible across the organization. Salesforce Agile Accelerator provides instant visibility and real time updates of your teams’ work on web/Salesforce and mobile/Salesforce1. Facilitate collaboration using chatter, get real time status of the team’s work with reports and dashboard and forecast the future using burn down charts.

And this is just the beginning….take a deep dive in to this impressive tool and find out on your own how this tool can help you better manage your work.

Pre Requisite: Install Salesforce Agile Accelerator in your sandbox. Please refer my previous blog " Saleforce Agile Accelerator Installation " to know the installation steps. 

Teams

What is Team?

A Team consists of the workforce that gets the work done. Agile practices speaks about having a self-sufficient team that has team members with all the roles and skills required to deliver the output/ get the work done. Which means ideally a team should have enough resources that during the sprint they don’t have to be dependent on other teams for their work to get done. Take an example of an IT company 1-2-3 SFDC a Scrum team consist of a Development team – Product Owner, Scrum Master, Business Owner, Program Manager, And the Development Team- Business Analyst, QA, Programmers/ Developers, Other etc.

You can add up to 33 roles as your team in Salesforce Agile Accelerator. 

Users:

Note: Make sure that your team members exist in the Salesforce environment. If not then create your team members in the Salesforce. Go to Setup -> Administer ->Manage Users-> Users.  If users don’t exist in salesforce you cannot save or add that team member.  

Once the users are in Salesforce you are good to create your team in Salesforce Agile Accelerator.

How to create a Team in Salesforce Agile Accelerator

Click on the Teams Tab from the tab section

Next click on the “All Teams link” and then “New Team”

Once the team members are added you can start adding the names for the team. You will also notice that the field will prompt their names automatically since you just added them in Salesforce. 

The form will ask you all the basic information about your Team. Team Name, Tag, Department, Domain, Team Members etc. Team allocation is important for any team to know the availability of the team members for that Sprint.

Team members and their roles varies from team to team. You can have stakeholders, business owners, other team members, managers, end users etc. in your team. They can play an important role in your team of providing inputs, requirements, assisting in taking decisions etc. but are not responsible to deliver work.  

These members may or may not be required to record their work. So for these team members the allocation would be 0% and for the core team it would be 100%.

Now take an example that one of the developers from your core team will be out for 2 days this Sprint cycle.

Total number of working days this Sprint = 10 days

No of Days taking Holiday = 2

No of days available = Total working days – no of days not available % 100= 10-2 = 80%

So the allocation % for the developer would be 80% for this Sprint. 

Post in Progress.......