personal favourite – Page 2

Scrum And The City

It spoke to me in a hushed, spiteful tone.

You suck!

I turned to face the source of such antagonistic mockery and made eye contact. From the same hole that was staring me down, it sneered a taunt from just out of reach, actively engaging in guerrilla warfare.

Welcome home, you jerk-faced low-life.

I was already feeling like crap, so this was the last thing I wanted upon dragging duffel bags filled with college text books up a couple of flights of stairs. Granted, it was one way to stay warm on a drizzly January afternoon. Granted, it was one way to fit in my daily work-out. Granted, it was a Sisyphusian reminder to ditch the dead tree I’ve dragged from home to home. Granted, it was –

Hey, you uncreative low-lifed jerk-face.

I had it – this was getting out of hand.

Yeah? Well whacha gonna do about it, punk?

I turned towards the fridge, knelt down, and stood back up, Cheerio in hand. I looked around the kitchen for a place to put it, preferably a container that loosely resembled a trash can. A rubbish bin. A garbage receptacle. An empty container of little-to-no value.

Like your soulless shell of a body, ya bum?

Again, I was already feeling like crap. I just came off a rough break-up, resulting in a desperate apartment hunt in mid-January, which is way off-season in this college town. I somehow found a place and threw wads of cash at the realtor to take it off the market. Now, everything of value to me was splayed across the kitchen floor in a haggered landscape of memories – all 5 taxi-loads. Except for the desk – I had a guy from Craig’s List help me with that. I had nothing to offer him besides the agreed upon amount, so we toasted with the one thing in my fridge: vodka.

You gonna offer me a shot, loser? Or are you just gonna continue projecting your inner monologue through a piece of cereal you picked off the floor of your filthy apartment?

The Cheerio was right. I was lonely. And physically spent. And emotionally spent. And in need of a trash can.

I thus started my single life in Boston – with a list. First item on that list: trash can. Defeated, I put my new and abusive friend back under the fridge.

Hey, if you like lists so much, why don’t you use that stupid Scrum certification to get your life in order, tough guy.

Again, the Cheerio was right.

I Am A Millionaire (And So Can You!)

Folks, it happened. I am a millionaire. After 10,000 hours, I’m popping tags like the silly can holders.

Or at least… I live like a millionaire. On the daily, I swan dive into a multi-storey vault of Dogecoin a la Scrooge McDuck. Luckily, such riches have afforded me the necessary thick skin and equally necessary metallic ~~Beyonce~~ bouyancy to not get all cut up by or drown in said vault of said coin. (I got 99 problems, but tetanus ain’t one. (Hit me!))

So after my morning swim, after shimmying the moon dust off my shoulders, I get on with my day. And my days are pretty ordinary, except for the ‘living like a millionaire’ part. My vast wealth of cryptocurrency stays in that vault because I don’t need it to live like a millionaire. I already know how without all that.

“What?” you say, “Are you gettin’ all cheesy on me?” Naw, Pepper Jack, this is something that recently hit me like a tonne of feathers with a brick in the middle.

Fill in this sentence for yourself:

I live like a millionaire when I…

Here, let me help you out – this is just some of what’s on my list. I live like a millionaire when I:

play Candy Crush when I go to the bathroom.
beatbox in the shower.
rack my brain around Chinese Checkers.
commandeer a public piano.
crack a bad joke.
watch and hear my wife’s reaction to said bad joke.
walk around holding my wife’s hand.
say ‘wife’ whenever I can ’cause it still sounds foreign.
blare ‘And You and I’ by Yes before getting married.
jam to ‘Burn’ by Ellie Goulding as I walk out of work.
bask in ‘Express Yourself’ by Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band just about any other time of day.
whistle my theme song.
sit at my ~~throne~~ desk.
hang out at a cafe.
drink a cappuccino.
go on a date with a buddy.
make up a silly story.
tell the story behind my watch.
tell the story behind my pen.
tell the story behind my wedding band.
tell the story behind the number four on clocks.
tell the story of how I work for Taco Bell as a motivational speaker.
tell this joke: Did you hear about the Scottish cross-dresser? He wore pants.
watch and hear your reaction to that joke.

Sure, if I had some loose Hamiltons I’d build a community music studio and start a hovercraft polo league, but I’d also continue to do the above already awesome things. And of course, how I live like a millionaire will differ from how you live like a millionaire.

How do you live like a millionaire?

How can you live like a millionaire right now?

Suddenly Deserve A Cupcake

My roommate, sophomore year in college, had a few phrases. My favourites were the euphemism of “intellectual clutter”, and the toothily grinned “treat yourself“.

(He also had a classy way of explaining vectors that involved demonstrating the resultant vector with a directional bobbing of his head between outstretched arms, his longer hair waving behind him like the circular ripples spawned when skipping stones at a steamy summer soiree. (My explanation of vectors is less classy and more… phallic. (That’s because vectors have both magnitude and direction. (Now you can’t unlearn that. (You’re welcome.)))))

This blog post is a continuation of the last, where I talked about leaving room in your Sprint for both the planned and unplanned, allowing yourself to be both proactive and reactive, where stories are thus either strategic or tactical. I can’t help but picture a yin-yang symbol at this point, so the Taoist in me is high-fiving me (from within) (odd… deep… deeply odd?) over my incorporation of balance into Sprint Planning. So let’s address value and effort, specifically for these ‘tactical’ stories that suddenly arise from time to time, by stepping through the Product Owner’s point of view.

The Product Owner is in charge of the vision of the product. For my ScrumOfOne, I view myself as a package of products (Merrill the musician, Merrill the financial responsible, Merrill the home dweller, etc.), each with its own vision. From any particular vision, there are epics, which are just large stories, which are broken down so that they are small enough to be taken into a Sprint, but within the context of its product backlog, a story has both value and effort. Value is indicated by its priority in the backlog. Effort is indicated by an assigned number of points.

All those items in those lists (stories in Product Backlogs) stem from a vision by the Product Owner.

So whether the Product Owner is telling the team to keep implementing stories from the Sprint Backlog (the planned), or to address issues that have suddenly arisen that can’t wait for the next Sprint (the unplanned), the direction is given based on what will get us closer to the Product Owner’s vision. Using this motivation, we will generally work on the thing with the next highest priority (subject to other Scrum principles like reducing work in progress to reduce waste and completing the Sprint Backlog to increase morale and allowing team self-management). Thus, if an unplanned task is suddenly a story with value, then like any other story towards a product vision, it should get points assigned for effort.

Is this cheating?

All I have to do is say that what I’m doing is good for me (something towards a product vision), and I suddenly deserve a cupcake (give myself points for the ScrumOfOne Sprint Backlog).

It sure feels like cheating, especially since it seems almost too easy! If I take my lady out on a date, I get points for a story completed that would have been from the ‘Be a good partner’ product backlog. If I have a friend visit, I get points for a story completed that would have been from the ‘Be a good friend’ and ‘Have a welcoming home’ product backlogs. If I get inspired to work on a project, I get points for a story completed that would have been from the… product backlog associated with that project.

In the corporate realm, sudden stories are taken in and worked on by the team, so you can bet your socks there are points associated with that effort!

Taking this to the extreme, you could be in extreme-reactionary mode, only doing things that come up. In the software realm, this is like only making bug fix releases and never building new features. In the ScrumOfOne realm, this is like only reacting to life and never taking initiative.

The second half of the Interrupt Pattern addresses this by programming an automatic abort of the Sprint if the buffer for unplanned activities overflows. So if the buffer for tactical stories is 15 points per Sprint, and the green light is given for a story that would mean we would complete 16 points or more of stories that were not from the Sprint Backlog, the Sprint pre-maturely ends and there is another re-planning. This drastic measure sheds light on the evident misalignment between planned priorities (Sprint Backlog) and actual priorities (embracing all interruptions).

So (…I tell myself…), if something comes up that is technically a distraction from the Sprint Backlog yet not a total mess (intellectual clutter), then feel OK taking it. Just remember to give yourself points afterwards (treat yourself).

Regularly Scheduled Chaos

Oh – hey! I almost didn’t see you there. You know. From up here on the bandwagon. The view is great. But you’re not here for that. You’re here ‘caus-

Snake Oil! Snake Oil! Snake Oil! Get some now! It’s great for what ails ya! Anything! Anything at all! Grandma got bunions? Papi got the sniffles? Then Snake Oil is for you! Apply directly to the forehead! Snake Oil!

Geez, don’t you hate that? Here we are, having a nice conversation, you down there, me up here, on the bandwagon, out where the deer and the antelope play, and out of nowhere we get interrup-

Fording a river? Who isn’t nowadays! For these hazardous trips, don’t risk it! Leave it to the experts! Let us at Caleb’s help you with some of our special caulk! Caleb’s Caulk! Don’t leave home without it! Caleb’s Caulk!

…interrupted. You can’t predict these things. (Unless, of course, you can …at which point please help me with trading Bitcoins.) You just have to be ready to roll with it (chaos), and I recently learned how after my last sprint (scheduled life).

See, Sprint 141 was my first one back after not doing any disciplined self-Scrumming, so I planned to do all this stuff. I had all this energy at my personal Sprint Planning session, where I looked over my Product Backlogs, grabbed the top-prioritized stories, threw ’em into the Sprint Backlog for Sprint 141, and was all like, “Yeah! I’m gonna DO this! Do it all! All the things!”

Yyyyyeah – no. I did not.

My Sprint 141 velocity was 37 points, which is respectable for me (more on how I’ve assigned points to personal/ScrumOfOne stories in a future post), but in the Retrospective, I looked at the stories associated with those 37 points, and noticed two things:

I didn’t get done even half of what I had planned for that two-week period.
I got a lot of other stuff done.

This ‘other stuff’ was mainly in reaction to unforeseen …interruptions, e.g., a buddy visiting, striking while the iron is hot for a surprise date, sudden extra work at …work.

So there I was, at my own personal Retrospective, feeling both good and bad at the same time. Good because I got a decent amount of stuff done – I was productive! Bad because half of my accomplishments weren’t from the planned Sprint Backlog, which meant they weren’t the top-priority… the things that would move me most towards the respective visions per personal Product Backlog – I was not efficient!

This last part is a downer. It’s a downer because I had done this all the time: planning to do a set of things over two weeks, and at the end of the two weeks, never getting them done. I have thus been injecting into my own life regular opportunities to show myself that I can’t get done what I planned, snowballing evidence of my inability to both commit and commit to myself! What’s a mother to do?

For just such situations (corporate teams encounter this, too), Scrum co-founder Jeff Sutherland recommends something called the ‘Interrupt Pattern‘. Essentially, be flexible to sudden direction changes by planning for less. Sprint Teams can do this by adding a buffer of points into their planned velocity, where this buffer is a placeholder for stories that suddenly crop up, like dealing with hot issues from a customer or a freak Y2K bug that was latent for 14 years.

For ScrumOfOne-rs like me, this means committing to fewer stories at the Sprint Planning, knowing that I will make up the rest of my bi-weekly productivity with either tactical accomplishments (reacting to life – stuff just came up) or strategic accomplishments (living proactively – stuff off my Product Backlogs).

This improvement to Sprint Planning was the more interesting Kaizen to come out of the last Retrospective. The piece of improvement I’m applying to this Sprint 142 is to push daily to complete a planned 1-point story. This ensures I’m doing something each day to refine myself. Today, that 1-point story is pumping out the weekly blog post.

Tomorrow, that 1-point story might well be to buy some of that caulk I’ve heard so much about…

Become A Superhero

Do you want to become a superhero?

Last week, at my favorite cafe on Newbury Street, I sat in on a talk by Dr. Robin S. Rosenberg, an author for the book, ‘What is a Superhero?‘. I liked the definition she discussed, which comprised of four parts.

1 – Be Super. You don’t need to be from out of this world, or have an ability that is beyond natural, but her criteria covers mortals with a capability on the upper tail of the bell curve of human knowledge & skills. I would argue it doesn’t have to be physical or strength-related. This is your super-power.

2 – Be a Hero. Do selfless acts. And not just once. I guess it’s a given that you primarily use your super-power while being selfless. Superheros are usually saving lives. Does that mean you have to save lives as well? More on that in a bit.

3 – Have an Alter Ego. If you’re going around not being normal (see Be Super, above), have an identity that embraces this, which might have to do with owning your new reality, psychologically. Think about how hikers of the Appalachian Trail take on different names.

4 – Have a Uniform. A costume, not necessarily all Spandex, extends the alter ego to being accepted by others, not just yourself.

What I find interesting about points 3 & 4 is that while, yes, you don’t need them to be effective (be a hero via your super-power), it allows you to be a normal human: mortal, fallible, someone who doodles when on the phone.

About saving lives… I asked the good doctor / author if this criteria for being a hero could be massaged to improving lives. She thought of a hero as one out to do good. Ha – selflessly do good. So, use your super-power to do good unto others.

Do you want to become a superhero?

Can you do something so well so as to be considered at the top of your ‘field’? This might be easier to accomplish if you can consider yourself at the top of your field, locally. Think of this super-power as your ‘gift’. This is you creating with your gift.

Can you selflessly do good by positively affecting other people? This might be easier to accomplish if you first think about affecting locally. This is you sharing your gift.

I believe we can all become superheros by creating and sharing our gifts.

Do you want to become a superhero?

Ask yourself: How can I use my gifts to do good?