Agile Practice in a Channel Project Team: Handling Urgent Business Demands

Previous posts mentioned a training session on agile, Kanban, and stand‑up meetings delivered by Microsoft MVP Xu on April 25, 2018. Using the so‑called M project team as a case study, this article summarizes the team’s practical agile adoption and how they handled an urgent business demand.

1. Difficulties faced by the M project team

The team suffered from "tight time, heavy tasks, insufficient staff". Specifically, rapid business changes generated frequent emergency requests; the team consisted of only a few members responsible for design, development, and testing of the entire channel system; and the group covered many roles (project manager, UE/UI designers, Java, Android, iOS, H5 developers, testers), requiring high collaboration.

2. Agile practice adopted

After the training, the team designed a Kanban board with seven columns (Demand, Design, Ready, Implementation, SIT, UAT, Production). They set a two‑week iteration, planned at the start, reviewed at the end, held daily 10‑15‑minute stand‑ups, and tracked tasks with cards. The board and rules were ready by May 2, 2018.

3. The urgent business demand

On the night of April 28, 2018, the project manager received a request to deliver a system registration query feature by May 12. The team performed reverse planning: testing on May 11, server deployment on May 10, pre‑production verification on May 9, preparation of deployment materials on May 8, and code merge on May 7. Because the request arrived during the May 1 holiday, work could only start on May 2.

4. Agile execution – turning the impossible into possible

On May 2, the manager called an emergency meeting, and the team committed to the task. They created user‑story cards on the board and split the work into UI design, backend development, Android development, and iOS development. Intensive overtime from May 2‑4 resulted in completed development and testing, as shown in the following screenshots:

After moving all cards to the "Ready for Production" column, the feature was successfully deployed on May 10, and the cards were moved to "Deployed".

The team concluded that agile enabled them to complete an apparently impossible task with high efficiency, reinforcing their belief in agile’s ability to handle rapid changes and prompting continued agile adoption.

5. The two‑sided nature of agile

While agile helped the team overcome this crisis, it is not a universal solution. If emergency demands become too frequent, agile can collapse. The article argues for a balanced view: use agile to improve responsiveness, but also strive to reduce the frequency of changes, avoiding over‑reliance on the method.

To be continued…