How EZ Ops solves issues in agile teams with Metro Retro.

Siobhan He is a Product Manager at EZ Ops, a startup producing digital operational and logistics solutions for Canadian oil companies that replace existing paper-based processes.

Their products handle all stages of oil operations, ranging from scheduling oil field maintenance tasks to back-office reporting and management, or tracking the transport of goods.

Because their products are used by a range of people in different roles in the oil industry, their product and engineering teams have to strictly prioritize their work to balance the needs of their different users. In addition, field operators may be in areas with no signal and have just their mobile devices to log their progress.

To ensure EZ Ops are continually delivering value to their customers, their three engineering teams are working in agile workflows and use regular retrospectives to inspect and adapt their processes.

Siobhan said “If we didn’t have retrospectives, we wouldn’t be communicating half as well as a team. We’d be unable to provide accurate timelines to stakeholders or colleagues, and we wouldn’t improve with each project. We’d be making the same mistakes over and over.”

“The nice thing about Metro Retro is it really encourages people to communicate and chat. This makes it easier to tackle any issues openly, then work collaboratively to solve them.”

The EZ Ops teams produce a set of Working Agreements that lay out how they work together. These working agreements ensure they incorporate best practices in their daily work together. At each retrospective they review the working agreements and use the retrospective results to decide if anything needs to be changed in their process.

“It’s really hard to keep track of track of these items without something like Metro Retro honestly, because we used to have, what I can only describe as ‘document chaos’. This is documents in folders and random places all over the place, which we knew was bad, but we didn’t know it was that bad until we purchased another company and had to combine their documents with our documents. So now we have this information stored in boards organized by year and purpose, and can export it if needed.”

Siobhan says:

“Metro Retro is the most robust whiteboard tool for creating a virtual version of all the meetings we used to have in person.” 

“Like Poker Planning for instance – it uses a virtual deck of cards so it feels close to the real thing. When estimating stories, we all place our cards on the board face down, and then flip them over on the count of three – if everyone has the same estimate we fire off the confetti to celebrate alignment. It’s the things like that where Metro Retro makes it feel like a fun team session”.