Category: adaptation

Hello – Is It Me I’m Looking For?

I can see it in my eyes.
I can see it in my smile.
I’m all I’ve ever wanted.
And –

…if we check out the System page of this blog, we see how this whole ScrumOfOne set of practices I’ve forged actually increases my Inner Peace.

Man does that sound awesome – I want me some of that existential goodness.

Sometime before the home settling, the wedding, the move, the move prep, and the wedding prep, I stopped being fully engaged in applying Scrum principles to my personal development. I had been working off of a Scrum-Lite process where, yes, I had a backlog, but it was to keep track of the things to which I was largely reacting. While the days were focused on mostly logistical issues, and rightfully so, what was missing was personal growth, and the accompanying Inner Peace.

Now that things have calmed down, with the state of the home being that folks have been able to stay over without being warned to mind the bear traps duffle bags and to watch out for that tree box, I’ve returned to putting things in a number of personal backlogs, prioritizing them, and siphoning off a few into the current sprint. And just the process of doing all that has felt grrrrreat! The relief has come less from knowing where I am going and more that I am not missing anything. I can’t get all the things done now, but they’re not forgotten, and the most important stuff is getting addressed. Very Scrum. What’s that tingling in my toes? Oh yeah. Inner Peace.

So I’m back on the bandwagon, and man do I not want to fall off and lose my growing Inner Peace… or… get dysentery.

Want more transparency? Fine. I thought it would be enough to tell y’all that I’m wicked pumped to be back in the game, but you’re egging me one… I’ll publish my velocity and the Kaizen story so y’all can learn along with me. There. You’re welcome.

The more important bits of Kaizen will fall into an improved System page – I’ll update that section to reflect what has been practical and repeatable.

First piece of Kaizen (for Sprint 141, which is the number of paychecks I’ve received, with a biweekly schedule that conveniently aligns with the sprintly schedule): Actually read the Sprint Backlog each morning. It’s simple, but this is the piece of adaptation that is independent, negotiable, valuable, ‘estimatable’ (such a clumsy word), specific, and testable that gets Scrummin’ back into my daily routine. And Inner Peace. Let’s not forget that.

Ode to Eliot

The relationship you have with your web hosting service is a very special one. (Man, I should totally write Hallmark cards…)

Eliot is the one-man shop behind OK Public, a web hosting company. He is my web host. Well, was my web host, until he decided to evict this very peace-loving blog… along with all my hosted peace-mongering files… along with all his other peace-ambivalent customers, because he has decided to transition to a new stage of his working life, or something silly like that, which effectively meant a grave inconvenience to me for the past week, and this is why (plus two weeks’ vacation) I haven’t been blogging. Instead, I’ve been finding, then migrating, this very peace-hording blog to another worthy home.

And it’s been strangely emotional.

This guy Eliot, he’s known a part of me that very few have seen. He’s seen me grow from a green and experimenting webmaster (remember that term?) to somebody who puts ‘blogger’ on his business card. He’s seen me through romantic relationships (Hey, Eliot, now I’m getting married!), two academic degrees, several moves, shepherding me into an online presence by being ridiculously there for me, holding my hand like a guardian angel, and generally being the definition of excellent and personalized support.

And now I won’t have him.

With him leaving this part of my life, he takes with him a direct link to a me as… a newb.

…

OK, I think I’m done processing this. Thanks for bearing with me, Eliot. I wish you luck and I hope to meet you in person some day. Now I can transition to a new stage of my life.

Hot Or Not, Fist Or Five

If you’re in Boston, you know it’s, like, 105 degrees. Or 85 degrees, dipping into the 90’s, but we adamantly complain about this weather like it’s suddenly our jobs, so it might as well be 105.

(Attempt at a smooth transition in 3… 2…)

Moving to what we can control, and might equally have a few opinions about, Retrospectives are meant to, yes, get people thinking back and talking about the Sprint. You might read that at the end of a Retrospective, there is a meta-Retrospective: the team talks quickly about how that meeting went. One way to do this is via the ‘fist or five’ technique.

At the same time, so have some fun with it by counting down from 3, everybody sticks up a hand with the number of fingers representing how much they liked the meeting. Five fingers mean they really liked the meeting, got a lot out of it, thought it was a solid use of time, and they’re so happy, they want to make love to everybody, like Roberto Benigni.

No fingers is a fist, and this means they really did not like the meeting, are now dumber for it, thought it was a total waste of time, and they’re so unhappy, they want to conduct atrocities of great evil, like not commenting code.

I’ve started applying this neat little technique to not just the Retrospective, but to each artifact and ceremony of the past Sprint. Do this at the beginning of the Retrospective by listing Stand-up Meeting, Sprint Planning Meeting, Sprint Backlog, Product Backlog, etc., and getting the team to vote on each of these, tallying up the number of 0s through 5s for each Scrummy thing.

Et voila: the team opines on pieces of the process as a primer to providing pithy ponderings on the previous passage of purposeful participation.

Tying this back to the last blog post, we now have more to consider for how to adapt in the next Sprint.

Between You And Showing Up

Ah, the motivation to get started on something. Sometimes, that is the hardest part of the activity. The example for me where this applies in spades is the morning run.

I love running. Sure, you get tired and sweaty and just want to walk at times and something or another might start hurting, but all that… I have no problem with; all that is fun. AND… I feel great afterwards: more than the endorphins, it’s feeling fit – maybe they’re the same thing. I prepend that to a workday, and I walk into the office feeling like a bad-ass, having proactively done something to better myself, feeling alive.

If I could just open my eyes and find myself running (sleep-running?), I’d keep running. While it’s effort, it’s ironically not the hardest. So what’s been coming between me and giving myself a radiantly awesome start to every day after turning off the alarm clock?

  • Not rolling back into bed.
  • Getting my feet to touch the floor.
  • Getting my butt off the bed.
  • Not checking Facebook, or email, or the news, on the laptop.
  • Getting running clothes on. Then shoes.

Hmm. It starts with feet and ends with getting them dressed: out of bed and into shoes.

Maybe… just maybe… if I put my running shoes next to my bed at night, I can slip into them in the morning and jump-start the whole process (’cause I’m not gonna roll back into bed with my shoes on).

MAYBE… just maybe… if I put the alarm clock ON the shoes next to my bed at night, I’ll be holding my shoes, facilitating the shoe-to-foot process.

Wow, this post was going to be about how showing up is the hardest part (the problem/challenge/opportunity), and just by going through that little exercise of asking myself, “What is coming between me and…” while writing it out in detail do I have something I can look over and subsequently fall into coming up with a potential solution, from the point of view of more easily showing up. I’m not sure if it’ll work, but at least I have a plan I can try out.

What is something you want to do or be? Ask yourself, “What is coming between me and…” this thing. Write it out. Each blocker. Each annoying or silly or serious blocker between you and this thing you’re after. Now, look over this list.

What can you do to more easily just… show up?

On Point…s

You have something you want to do. You’re doing it for a reason (it has value, or benefit) and it doesn’t come free (it has cost, like time or money or focus). Generic enough of a start for a blog post? Good. Let’s talk Scrum.

You have a story. It has a benefit (business value) and a cost (effort). The backlog is a list of things to be done (stories), where this list is ordered (prioritized) by business value (fine, personal value since we’re in ScrumOfOne-land, or just value), with the highest / most important at the top. Each story has points associated with it, representing effort.

Business value is represented by backlog priority. Effort is represented by story points.

This is simple. This is Scrum101. And this is something I didn’t fully get until the Product Owner training last week. From this simple and clear concept, I am amending how I’ve been doing my ScrumOfOne.

More important stories are not ‘worth’ more points. How much a story is ‘worth’ is represented by its position in the backlog (be it the Sprint backlog or the Product backlog) and by this qualifier ONLY. Yes, the more valuable a story is, the more effort it might be, but not necessarily. For a recent example, I look at how I handled stories related to getting the Product Owner training.

I started with an ‘epic’ (just a large story): Become a Certified Scrum Product Owner. Then I broke it down to investigating the training options & timing, signing up & paying for it, getting reimbursement paperwork underway at work, and attending the classes. The epic, though important and thus close to the top of the backlog, is too large to fit into a Sprint, so it was broken down. Of those stories, ‘attending the classes’ was relatively the easiest (least effort): just show up! Of those stories, ‘investigating the training options & timing’ was relatively the hardest (most effort): spend time.

These stories, in retrospect, in and of themselves do not require a lot of effort, so they should not get a lot of points. Yes, working towards another Scrum-related certification helps me in better crafting this ScrumOfOne idea and improves my marketability, but this does not mean it gets lots of points. Instead, it gets a better/higher position in the backlog.

In the business world, coming up with a value per story means find the dollar value. In the world of personal development, coming up with a value per story is… harder. In both cases, this is one of the jobs of the Product Owner: prioritize the backlog, i.e., identify the value (thus, relative value) of each story.

With my example above, I would say this set of stories had high value and low effort. One would think these types of stories would be ones to do first – prefer to implement stories with the highest benefit to cost ratio. Or I could just look at the title of slide #52 of the slide deck from last week’s training:

Prioritization of Business Value / Effort Can Cut Cost and Time to Market by 50%

Filtering out the MBA-speak, this might look like:

Prefer to do the coolest stuff that’s not that hard to pull off.

And this starts with getting the idea behind ‘points’ straight.