Seattle – Day 1: Presenting the blueprint

Pictures of the day

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As you can surely notice, the first ALM Rangers session was special, fun and we got *very* candid feedback from the audience, which is PHENOMENAL. Keep it up!

Learning's of the day

Concerns

The feedback we received in our first session is inline with what we have been hearing from the communities:

  • Some of the ALM Ranger guides are getting too comprehensive and big to consume.
  • Discoverability of ALM Rangers tooling and guidance is difficult on CodePlex!
  • Videos not considered valuable by some?!?
  • Effort invested in keeping screenshots to the latest version in Hands-on Labs is better spent in other areas?!?

Our current FY13+ thinking

It was great to get a lot of the candid feedback we got and having the discussions with the field engineers. Fortunately we have been mulling over many of the challenges raised in the first session. Here are some of the thoughts and discussions we are having.

We would like to …

  • Run with small (1-5) sized Ranger teams in future.
  • Reduce the cadence of Ranger projects to a quarterly rhythm.
  • Slice and dice traditionally large projects and deliverables into crisper, smaller and more focused deliverables.
  • Consider a new format for value-add guidance, creating scenario focused 5-10 page documents.
    • Traditional media:
      • 1 x Guide
      • m x Quick Reference Posters
      • 1+ Hands-on Labs
      • 0+ Videos.
    • Future media:
      • n x 5-10 page scenario (Epic) focused documents, which include Quick Reference Poster(s) and Walkthroughs
      • 0+ traditional Hands-on Labs
      • 0+ Videos

What do you think?