Berry With A Beat

I am now a professional mime.

When the Internet decides to be slow, in turn cutting out the audio component of a meeting I’m in the middle of with my teammates in Romania or India, the HD webcam stays rolling, like an out-of-date analogy, my face lights up, like Garry Kasparov playing chess, and my hands are all over the place, like an Italian stereotype.

I lead teams that are not in the same room, so to mitigate the 3 continents and 10.5 hours between me and, say, Vivek & Mihai, I:

  • tell stories to bring people together, like how I ran into Kevin Spacey at a Starbucks
  • show and tell the random things lying around our conference rooms, like little trinkets like oversized clothes pins and 3D-printed Sesame Street characters
  • intonate exaggeratedly, because our budget doesn’t allow for teams to have studio-grade microphones & speakers to share speech subtleties
  • apologize liberally, because I am often cutting people off since it is not always clear when somebody has finished sharing their thought because of an audio lag
  • pause often, because teammates often start talking for a few seconds before realizing they have yet to unmute themselves
  • insult them flatteringly, like, “oh no no please, the top of your head is so well shaped… please don’t ruin this experience by showing the rest of your face.”
  • explain that what I had just said was a joke, because sarcasm does not always travel across national borders fully intact
  • crack jokes, because it brings people together via laughter

I will sing and dance and still be productive so that people know that when you come to my meetings, you know you will leave with a little more funk, and your day will be a little sweeter. This is my flavour of ScrumMastery; I am a berry with a beat. My goal is for you to leave as a berry with a beat.

Oh, what joy it is to create a berry with a beat.

Titmouse

You are a titmouse.

Finding yourself in a small room, dimly lit, you’re still unable to make out shapes.

You wait.

Resuming interest in the dark, the shadows outline the contents of the room, which are just not that interesting.

You leave.

Ibizan sea breezes take hold of your wings.

You have wings. (Whoa. Nice.)

Ever higher you float. And then, you don’t.

You fall.

Nearing terminal velocity, you flail.

You flap.

Death stares you down.

You fly.

Life carries you… somewhere.

You follow. (Fun! Until…)

Your ponderous nature takes over the intercom at cruising altitude, and you ask yourself, “What’s a titmouse doing off the coast of Spain? I’m a North American bird of genus Baeolophus of the family Paridae. I don’t even know how to pronounce those words, but I know that’s my deal, and that me swooping around the Mediterranean ain’t making an ounce of sense.”

You get existential angst.

Unctuous olfactory onslaughts assault your feathery core.

You get hungry.

Nearby is a treat.

You hone in.

Icarus swerves up and out of the way of your gastro-intestinally-induced nose dive.

You are a thing of beauty at high speed. (Natural velocity.)

Villagers scatter at the news of a falling star.

You laugh.

Evacuated streets set the backdrop for your table for one.

You dine.

Ravished by the dish, you rest for a minute.

You seek more.

Satiation punctuates your ever engorging desire to feast on what feeds your soul. There’s just no other way to describe it, especially since it doesn’t make any sense, since…

You are a titmouse. (…)

Everyone should try hummus.

You send this link to everybody who figures out the Morse Code in your email signature.

Pain Is Just Information

I took a systems physiology class in college one summer, and on the very first day, the professor said, “If there’s one thing you remember from this class, it’s that ‘Pain is just information’.” Pain let’s you know something is up. Or down. Or out of place. Or stuck in place. Or generally amister amiss.

(This blog post is about a conversation from work. I’ll try not to make these boring and solely technical, but if you decide to give up on reading this because you’re emotionally distraught over Scotland not being its own country, remember: Pain is just information.)

Now that I’m a ScrumMaster by day (your local superhero by night), I get to talk through sticking points that my team members have with parts of the process, and the point that was sticking this time involved the Sprint backlog.

(I can’t believe it… to be your own country… you get to stay up as late as you want, eat haggis whenever you want, drink scotch whenever you want…)

During the Sprint, something may come up that we as a team end up working on, with the Product Owner’s blessing, that wasn’t planned for in the Sprint Planning meeting. The question is: If we can add things to the Sprint mid-Sprint, why can’t we remove the things we now know we won’t get done mid-Sprint?

(…skinny dip with my sheep in whatever loch I want…)

Seems like a decent enough question: by accepting sudden stories, you’ve already blown out the original plan, so why not update the plan based on new information? Since the Spring backlog is what the team committed to doing at Sprint Planning, it’s easy to understand why the team doesn’t want to see this thing they know won’t get done: it’s embarrassing, or it induces anger, or it elicits some kind of negative emotion (or else the team wouldn’t be asking to get rid of it), some kind of pain.

(…wear kilts as short as I want…)

The way I sell this is via acknowledging this ‘pain’ as not necessarily bad, but useful: at the end of the Sprint, the stories that do not get done represent a quantifiable adjustment to consider during the next Sprint Planning session. If no ‘outside’ stories were brought in mid-Sprint, then the undone stories represent the team planning to do more than they could pull off. If the story points associated with the dragged-in ‘outside’ stories were the same number of story points associated with the undone stories, then the undone stories were neatly ‘displaced’ by the sudden stories and the team did a spot on job of estimating how much work it could pull off.

(Did you hear about the Scottish cross-dresser? He wore pants.)

Sure, it feels icky to leave things undone, especially when you said you’d do ’em, but if it’s because the Product Owner asked you to do something else, then heck, it’s totally not your ‘fault’ – the person in charge of prioritizing work… reprioritized work! And this was the particular scenario of the sticking point – there was pain, and it was reframed as information.

My systems physiology professor would be proud. If I only remembered his name… this sucks, I really liked that guy… man, this is embarrassing…

(Pain is just information.)

Oh shut up.

Trial By ScrumMaster

Folks, I’ve made it – it’s been 2 months since I’ve lasted blogged, and that’s because I had been transitioning away from being paid to break expensive hospital equipment test medical devices in Andover, towards being paid to crush the spirits of insolent coders coach software development teams in Boston’s Fort Point district (by South Station).

I don’t always change careers, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis it’s exciting and a whirlwind of activity, from sending off and being sent off by my close-knit awesome team (and colleagues of 6 years), to welcoming and being welcomed by a couple of virtually-knit teams (half of my colleagues are in Romania!).

My first job was to reduce the number of unknown unknowns, i.e., yes, there’s an onboarding process to becoming a new employee (the formal stuff) and learning the social structures (the informal stuff) at a new place, so I’ve got to figure out what they even are to then address them.

My second job was to familiarize myself with the teams and the state of Scrum within each of them, i.e., learning Indian names and Romanian names, then how to pronounce them, then getting a sense of how much Scrum they know. Lucky for me, I’ve got a couple of crews that WANT to get better at this game. They LIKE the theory, and they WANT help with the practice. They’re smart and they push back on me, forcing me to lead discussions so everybody’s on the same page and willing to experiment with new processes.

It’s been trial by fire.

It’s been drinking from the firehose.

It’s been the starkly punctuated evolution of my wanting to be better at Scrum from leading a team of just me to now leading two teams of international team members.

It’s been trial by firehose trial by ScrumMaster.

I feel awesome, and since my theme song isn’t on YouTube yet, I’ll give you the next best thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, Kashmir by Led Zeppelin. You’re welcome.

Analyzing Blog For Direction

This blog post is like green tea: it’s good for me, yet to do it right, I’m not supposed to add sugar. So, behold… a treat that doesn’t go down the smoothest, although it is healthy. I mean, I could try to make this a fun read, but I won’t because… this doesn’t need it. This post represents the culminating bloggular goodness that I’ve thought about over two years ago.

I’m still analyzing what I’ve written via how I’ve tagged my posts, and today I cover the category of ‘direction’. Below are the summary points per post with this tag, which don’t include those that were also tagged ‘path series’, which I think I’ll cover another time.

  • Happiness: Become a heretic because initiative is happiness. Do something that excites me because excitement is happiness.
  • My Vision Sources: Study direction-related sources and derive a method for determining vision.
  • Create & Connect, Supply & Demand: Create something of value in which I am skilled, or is fully engaging, or elicits my passion, or is a combination of the three, then connect by sharing, teaching, or somehow helping others feel good.
  • Bow Ties & Shoelaces: Inner changes are reflected externally.
  • One Epic Thing Before You Die: Whatever this thing is for me, it’s the most cool/epic if it most aligns with my purpose / life path… now do it every day.
  • Don’t Label Me, Bro: Do more and more of fewer things, but more important things, and get better and better at each of them.
  • Style Over Fashion: I’m not looking for the fleeting & crowd-sourced, but the everlasting & self-sourced.
  • That First Tiny Step: What is that first tiny step towards my dream, something that takes almost no time and no effort that gets me that tiniest bit closer?
  • Soutata: Leverage my unique gifts and quit the rest.
  • First Do Cat Food: I have to get deck-clearing capability first before being able to think at the high level.
  • Always Be Outputting: Increase outputting by decreasing inputting.
  • Blogging Break: All advice about success are facets of the same gem.
  • Sum Of Your Parts: Grouping stories into releases per product (facets of me, each with a vision) leads to paths of punctuated evolution in each area of my life!
  • Life In Your Years: In the end, it’s not the years in my life that count. It’s the life in my years.
  • To Be A Better Person, Do Anything: I am defined by my ability to supply a demanded product or service, so do something, something impressive.
  • You’re Allowed: That awesome life I want starts with realizing… I’m allowed to live it.
  • Baconday: I’ve forgotten I enjoyed writing outlandish stories.
  • ScrumOfFun or Local Drummer Boy: I want to lower the barrier to entry for performing music.

Hmm… lots of good stuff. What happens if I try to mash most of ’em all together?

To be happy and improve my quality of life, leverage my unique gifts to do very well just a few purposeful things (everylasting, self-sourced), while quitting the rest (what I don’t do well and consuming in general), to take the initiative (aka being happy) every day and create something exciting (aka being happy), then connect with others.

I am actually allowed to be happy and live a big dream, so take a small step towards it, developing myself via one aspect of me at a time, doing low-level important things before high-level important things.

So what specifically brings me happiness? Writing outlandish stories. Lowering the barrier to entry for performing music.

Like I said. Culminating bloggular goodness. That last part is specific to me, but the rest respresents a study of how one can get some kind of life direction.

I’m sipping this slowly. It’s still hot.