Category: product backlog

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.

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.

Frustration

Once upon a time, I was frustrated.

This was, like, yesterday.

I just didn’t like how things were going, to the point where I got home, plopped myself on the couch, and sat there, staring at a candelabra that had way more color than the state of my soul. Things weren’t going my way.

Ha. Now that I’ve typed that, I realize that is a very accurate phrase to describe my mood all those day ago.

Things weren’t going my way.

Thus, I ruminated on this thought, chewing through the fat of gloomy cud, regurgitating thoughts that led to:

Oh, those dang things! It’s their bloody fault! They weren’t doing what I wanted them to do! Grrr!!!

Once I realized how I was thinking about these things, I bit my tongue; I chewed through my frustration. The insight was recognizing my passivity. The solution is being a ‘Man (/Woman) of Action’.

Granted, there is some solid good that comes from working through grief and not just sweeping undeniable emotions under the rug (you’ll just trip over them later). So once I did that, by sitting and doing nothing useful because I felt like the accomplished equivalent of a gastronomical intermediate by-product, I figured I should make a plan of action, and follow through, based on a set of values I find important – y’know, taking action.

Oh, that’s right. I already did that. I have one of those. It’s called my ScrumOfOne personal Sprint backlog, built off of my larger backlog(s) of things I want to do and be, prioritized by what I find important.

Stick with the plan. Tweak every couple of weeks. My plan.

Phew. That was a lot to go through since, like, yesterday.

Sum Of Your Parts

You’ve heard how something is more than the sum of its parts? Well, so are you; however, it helps to think about you in parts. So let’s think about your parts.

No! Not like that!

Last week (I’m shifting to blogging just once a week for hopefully more quality per post), I mentioned the idea of partitioning out areas of your life, and then changing these one or two at a time. These are the ‘parts’ of your life. All the things (ah, those abstract things) you want to do in life will most likely be associated with one of these life areas.

Using Scrum terminology, and some fancy footwork, replace ‘things’ with ‘Backlog Items’ and ‘life areas’ with ‘Products’. Poof. Magic. Tell him what he’s won, Johnny!

You can now be thought of as a package of products, each with its own backlog.

Or not. You can think of yourself however you freakin’ want. I recommend you try it, though. There are awesome payoffs, especially if you’re curious about the Scrum way of thinking of things. Let’s use an example. Take a guy. Random guy. Let’s call him… Merrill. He’s quite a number of wonderful things:

  • Merrill, the physical homo sapiens.
  • Merrill, the financially responsible.
  • Merrill, the musician.
  • Merrill, the ScrumOfOne thought leader. (Whoa! Were those angels singing…?)
  • Merrill, the home dweller.
  • Merrill, the guy who gets paid to break expensive things at work.

He’s oh so much more than the above, of course, but let’s treat each of these ‘life areas’ as a product. Thus, there is a Product Owner for each product, prioritizing stories based on a vision. Sure, Merrill could set a vision for himself as a whole person, but just as you might do that for yourself, I’ll bet this vision would end up being phrased in terms of some area(s) of your life. Thus,

Awesome Payoff #1: One awesome vision per product… many products per you… many ways you can be awesome!

Does this connote a lack of direction and focus? Nay, fair citizen. Dreaming out a better you is now not just dreaming big, but dreaming multiple dreams, and only the dreams you care about. Merrill, the watch-maker, isn’t exactly a Merrill that Merrill particularly cares about, especially not relative to the other Merrills listed above, so the direction is now better defined. We can now better address each life area, I mean, product, via some familiar Scrum-a-licious ideas.

Awesome Payoff #2: Grouping stories into releases per product leads to paths of punctuated evolution in each area of your life!

In evolutionary biology, as most memorable childhood stories begin, this is the idea that covers how phenotypic changes might be observed with relatively low frequency, even though genotypic changes are constantly occurring. In words a little less Grimm, you can continue putting in work, under the hood, although you won’t really see results until enough of these new pieces come together to ‘release’ a new piece of functionality. You keep evolving, with something novel punctuating the journey every once in a while: punctuated evolution.

Back to the example of the purely hypothetical Merrill, in this case, the martial artist, a release might be to achieve a yellow belt in the martial art of karate. This involves a number of steps (find a dojo, set aside funds and time, enroll, stretch regularly, practise that first kata without stopping, then with good form) that eventually, once all these stories are complete, unlock an achievement. Each ‘release’ for this product represents a punctuation in the evolution to becoming a fifth-degree-black-belt-super-dude, in line with the vision of being able to fend off enemies from attacking my Merrill’s village using a fifth-degree-super-stare. Now to find matching shoes…

I, I mean, Merrill can work on this while working on another product, say, Merrill, the home dweller. If that vision includes waking up to a cove in Maine, perusing Craig’s List’s Down East section may be a story. See how this works? All the things you want to do in life turn into stories onto backlogs of your ‘productized’ life areas. Have one area in life you feel needs some work more than others? You can manage this in the context of seeing the opportunity costs in front of you: the other stories in the other backlogs.

Awesome Payoff #3: Reduced overwhelm!

Or not. Maybe seeing all the things you want to do in life freaks you out, or as you’re working living through sprints, you feel you’re not moving fast enough. Well, you can only move as fast as you can (Merrill’s not cutting any corners by buying a yellow belt, especially without matching shoes…), plus, you’re the ScrumMaster role, too, in this ScrumOfOne model of personal development, so you can work on being more efficient (mastering the ‘how’) now that you’re more effective (mastering the ‘what’).

This is why I say there will be fewer feelings of being overwhelmed: your backlogs are prioritized so you know you’re working on the most important thing now or next, and that’s the best any one of us can do: knowing that all parts of you are taking up space on this floating blue marble in a way that is most aligned with how you want to deep inside.

Awesome Payoff #4: A more wholly enjoyable now!

Admittedly gratifying payoff: This post closes a loop opened about five months ago.

First Do Cat Food

That’s right. Cat food. I have to deal with cat food. You do, too. We all do. Freakin’ cat food… and I don’t even have a cat…

Cat food is the mundane. Cat food is the every day task. Cat food is the unavoidable. Much like literal cat food, if you don’t continue to do (…buy? sell? feed your cat? feed yourself? trade on the hot and emerging cat food commodities market?) cat food, something important ceases to work. Cat food is important at the lowest level, the opposite of which are activities towards fulfilling your purpose: important at the highest level. So, while moving along your life vector is important, so is cat food, and sometimes cat food comes first.

David Allen did a Google Tech Talk five years ago: GTD and the Two Keys to Sustaining a Healthy Life and Workstyle. Of ‘Getting Things Done‘ fame, he talks about two aspects of self-management: control and perspective. Getting control is mastering workflow, where you spend time collecting, then processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing. Getting perspective works with horizons of focus, from 50,000 feet, or your purpose and principles, to ground level, or the next actions; it is here where he says we should start, and not with a vision. You have to get deck-clearing capability first before being able to think at the high level.

Now that I think about it… this is what I did almost two years ago, when I first moved to my current place, where I started what ended up being a first version of ScrumOfOne. When at a complete loss of what to do next, when I had to clear my at least mental deck, I stepped through the following list first:

Eat food. Shop for food. Pay bills. Tidy up kitchen. Tidy up room. Do laundry. Iron.

Yeah. Ironing. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Much as I like the idea of dealing with cat food before focusing on vision, I’d treat chronic pains the same way, where this includes items that are annoying, always there, and are general, glaring impediments to happiness. Sure, you can work on your purpose, but if you’re struggling with food, clothing, and shelter, and you’re concerned, then this’ll sit like a gremlin at the forefront of your brain and not let you freely pursue your heart song (ooh, I like that metaphor). You don’t need to totally rid yourself of this gremlin before starting down your happy path, but it does help to have a plan.