drunkenpm

Podcast Interview with Stephen Denning

2013-05-20T08:00:00.000-05:00

My Projects at Work interview with Stephen Denning, author of "The Leaders's Guide to Radical Management" and new board member of the Scrum Alliance.

Johanna Rothman's Personal Kanban Blog

2013-05-16T11:48:00.001-05:00

Just discovered Johanna Rothman's Personal Kanban blog posts from a few weeks ago. There is a lot of great detail on the thought process and practice of using PK over a 5 day period.

Her posts start here:
http://www.jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2013/04/personal-kanban-and-iterations-day-1.html

Personal Kanban Weeks 10-12

2013-05-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

The Heart of Darkness

Kanban. (expletive) Still only in Kanban. Every time I think I’m gonna wake up back in the GTD…

Towards the end of my experiment with Kanban-for-1 I was feeling like I had lost my way. I was still carrying too much work to be able to make use of Kanban-for-1, but my attempts at using it had taught me a number of useful things.

Whatever I use, it needs to be completely portable.
Whatever I use needs to be available to me whether I am online or off.
Whatever I use needs to be simple enough that the act of using it does not become a time/productivity suck. The tool can’t be in my way.
I really like working with a physical board and would like something as close to that as possible.
When I am home, and using the physical board on the wall, the process works quite well for me.

I toyed with the idea of trying to get a piece of plastic that I could use as a physical board and that I could roll up and carry with me. But I’m guessing that the person in seat 21A (who is probably still a bit irked about losing the battle for the armrest) is not going to take kindly to me unrolling my big Kanban board to work on it mid flight.

The Horror, The Horror

I did attempt to use my Kanban journal. This is the book I make notes in each week on how things are going. I carry it with me each time I go on the road, so it seems like a great fit. Exiting Kanban-for -1, I re-created all my post its and created a PK Board in my notebook that was just like the one on my wall. It worked great until I actually placed the post-its in the book. I was right back to the Kanban-for-1 issue.

Drowning in a bunch of stuff I could not really see clearly. Just like with Kanban-for-1, if I had to move a task, first I had to dig through the piles of tasks to figure out where it was.

Disclaimer: I should point out that if you are reading this hoping to get to a point where I realize I’m just carrying way too many tasks… you might want to get a sandwich… it’s gonna be a while.

I decided to take a look at the Personal Kanban apps again. My requirements were the same:

Must be available on laptop, iPhone and iPad.
Must be as close to my physical board as possible (meaning must allow for swim lanes).
Must have some capacity for dealing with recurring tasks.
Must be available online and offline with a sync capability or something as easy as capturing notes on a post it or index card.

Basically I’m looking for Things, but Kanban style (cough cough Cultured Code cough cough).
Since I’ve started writing this blog people have been kind enough to send in a number of recommendations. Trello seems to be very popular. I’ve also received suggestions that I use Evernote for Kanban. I’d love to be able to do that, but I’ve not yet found a tool that would allow me to do so in as effortless a manner as I am looking for. Basically, if using the tool is more work than pulling an index card or a post it out of my pocket and capturing the item/updating the item while I am in an elevator, walking down the street, or sitting on a plane, it’s too much work.

Unfortunately, none of the tools I was able to find met all my requirements. However, after looking over the options, I decided o give Leankit a try. My reasons for choosing it were not entirely scientific, but I’m human…

Leankit allowed me to do the following:

Set up my swim lanes just like I had them on the wall.
Define the work state columns however I wanted.
Establish whatever WIP limits I wanted and warn me when I tried to exceed them.
It let me color code the cards based on work type.

The last point may seem trivial, but to me, it is very significant and one of the primary reasons that I have so much trouble with personal Kanban applications. The value of my physical board is that I can put everything I had to do up there at once. I can look at it all at once. It is a really big information radiator. For me, it’s a billboard telling me what is going on with the things I feel I need to do. No matter how awesome the software is, or how big my monitor is, there doesn’t seem to be a way to replicate the big thing on the wall + tactile interaction thing.

While my preference for a physical board is clearly established, there is no way that my physical board and my Martin travel guitar are going to fit in the overhead, so I need me some app-age.

"Never get out of the boat... Unless you were goin all the way."
(Capt. Willard)

Leankit

I used Leankit for about a month during this project. As far as Personal Kanban apps go, it is my weapon of choice. I’ve not tested out the paid version, which includes some extra features and more detailed analytics, but I found the free version to be very helpful in tracking my work on the road. My favorite aspect of the application was the customization. I really liked that I could set up my board in Leankit to mirror the one I have at home. In practicing any work habit, I believe the first step should always be the physical practice. If it moves to an electronic tool, then it is important to select a tool that allows you to mirror your physical behavior. Leankit offered me the most freedom there.

It even allowed me to set up multiple backlogs so that I could mirror how Things had worked for me. While I wasn’t able to figure out how to get recurring tasks going, I was able to create a ReUsable backlog so that each night I could move the recurring Daily items back into that backlog if I wanted. I didn’t actually end up doing that, but it somehow eased my mind to know that I could.

It also allows you to set due dates, mark work as blocked and it has an icon system for type of work.
So, Leankit allowed me to replicate my physical board on the web. It also has an iPhone application which took a little time to get the hang of, but which allowed me to update items as long as I could get online. With respect to my requirements:

Must be available on laptop, iPhone and iPad (PASS)
Must be as close to my physical board as possible (meaning must allow for swim lanes) (PASS)
Must have some capacity for dealing with recurring tasks (FAIL)
Must be available online and offline with a sync capability or something as easy as capturing notes on a post it or index card (FAIL)

From a mobility standpoint, with the exception of offline sync, the tool works quite well. It allows me to access my work, update it, enter new items, etc. You can even set it up to allow you to access multiple accounts. On my iPhone I have Leankit set up to access my personal account under one email address and another one I use for Scrum Alliance volunteer work.

The fact that Leankit did not meet all my requirements is not significant for me. None of the applications I looked at were able to meet all of them. From a customization, portability and usability standpoint, I am a big fan of Leankit.

You can't go out into space with fractions.

Initially I had planned to keep testing different applications. What I discovered after a few weeks was that while I want to the portability, the loss of big information radiator-ness was crippling. This was something I decided needed further research, but not so much in the way of testing additional apps. What I felt I needed a better handle on was why I wanted the apps and what I was actually doing with them. I do expect to go back and test out some additional apps – I really want to take a look at Trello because a lot of people have mentioned to me that they use it. But, after a few weeks with Leankit I decided to bail on trying new software for a while because it was time to start working with a Personal Kanban coach. Coverage of that will begin in the next blog post.

Personal Kanban Week 9

2013-04-30T10:43:00.003-05:00

Productivity Hangover

Ten minutes ago I was supposed to be writing this blog post. What I was doing instead was cleaning out the articles I have stored in Instapaper that have been in the queue for so long that they are no longer worth reading. This seemed really important at the time. And, I was actually-really supposed to be writing this blog post 30 minutes ago. But 30 minutes ago I was doing the stuff I meant to do 2 hours ago. And that is because 2 hours ago, I was still asleep because I stayed up until 3 AM trying to finish the things I had planned for the yesterday. This morning is all about the productivity hangover.

Yesterday, like most days, I planned too much into the day. There was no realistic way I’d be able to get it done given the fact that time is not quite as flexible as I’d like it to be and that I don’t have one of those boxes from Primer.

When a Problem Comes Along...

In working through this Personal Kanban project there is a question thing that has remained kind of an open issue for me the entire time. What about WIP? If you aren’t familiar with it, WIP stands for Work in Progress. In Kanban, the goal is to limit your work in progress in order to help maximize your throughput. Or, to put it more simply, you need to understand how much you can do at once before you start mucking things up. Once you understand that, you need to prevent yourself from taking on too much at once (and mucking things up). This also helps you understand how long it takes to get items through the system.

For the most part, the practitioners of Personal Kanban that I have spoken with have admitted that WIP is not something they pay much attention to. In speaking with them I did not dig too deeply on that topic at the time because it seemed to be non-critical. I was looking at WIP as a holdover from a more traditional approach to Kanban that had less relevance in Personal Kanban. Also, whether or not it is right or wrong, the items on my board are not sized in any way. Everything is the same, whether it is a writing a new Statement of Work, doing a load of laundry, finishing Clive Davis’s biography, or going through the legal steps of closing down a company. It is all just stuff I am trying to prioritize and do.

If you can dodge a wrench…

A few weeks ago I started working with an Agile Coach who was willing to take on the role of being my Personal Kanban Coach/Sherpa/Confessor. I am very fortunate that he was willing to take this on. The guy is brilliant and I have mad respect for him. I also can’t help but feel a bit bad for the guy. As far as being a coachee goes, I’m definitely having much with the room for optimization.

When I told him I told him I wasn’t really tracking my WIP I am pretty sure I heard him fall off his chair. The productivity guilt monster reared up and shamed me… so I recanted. I explained that I was tracking WIP …-ish. Which meant I had listed a number for WIP at the top of each of my columns and then I just wildly ignored that whenever the hell it seemed convenient…. Which was/is most of the time.

Putting the “fun” back in dysfunction

Shockingly, there are days when I can’t get everything done. Many times the reason is that I have other activities scheduled during time I would otherwise be working. I feel safe in the assumption that I am not alone in this. And yet for many of us, we somehow manage a level of delusion that permits us to plan to do work during the time we know we will be otherwise engaged. When this happens, we have these items, which we unrealistically planned, which cannot be completed on the schedule we put together. I have a master’s degree in project management and I’m deep with the Agile. I know how I am supposed to do this. I also know that how I am doing this is not healthy. I know it is not realistic. And yet it happens, over and over. I’m slowly becoming even more aware of how sharply fundamental an issue this is and how deeply and negatively it impacts my productivity. Because I do not have a clear and present awareness of my capacity and how to plan for that without exceeding it, I am always overfilling my bucket. When I am teaching people in a work setting about how to keep from doing this, it’s easy to explain. I even have a calculator I’ve made for folks to use to help prevent them from overcommitting themselves each Sprint. But on an individual level am I really supposed to size every single thing I do and plan for doing just that and no more? That’s just not realistic.

And suddenly, just like that, I’m one of “those” students. The ones who like the ideas behind Agile, but who really need to spend some time at the Wall of Won’t.

(The teacher in me would now like to take the student in me out back now for a quick kneecapping… just for good measure.)

Sadly, I do not have a card for that on my board.

I hate when that happens.

Sherman! Time for a new Experiment!

I believe that understanding my capacity at a daily level, and planning to meet, but not exceed that capacity will allow me to complete more work each day. I believe that getting more items to a done state each day, and not leaving a lot of unfinished work on the board will have a positive impact on my ability to get work done that will further improve my productivity. I also believe that if I do not plan to do more than is possible in a day I will be better enabled to get the rest I need to be as productive as possible in future day. This is all common sense. It’s been proven over and over. We all have that voice in our heads telling us that we are special, that we can do more, that we are not bound by the normal laws of time and physics.

Yeah… not so much.

To experiment with this I am going to run two tests. First, I’m going to try the easy one … estimating ideal time for the items in my list and then also estimate my capacity. It will involve some overhead because I am going to have to do this every day, but I will try it for a week to see what happens.

The second part, which will be more challenging for me will be to try breaking my work up into pieces that are small enough to track progress on a daily basis. I’m going to run this for two weeks and then report on it.

Next week I’ll be back to the topic of software for Personal Kanban.

Podcast Interview with Factory of One author Dan Markovitz

2013-04-15T08:45:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I had the chance to interview Dan Markovitz. Dan is the author of "A Factory of One", a great book on Personal Kanban. The podcast is hosted on the Projects at Work site here.

Personal Kanban Week 7

2013-04-11T16:53:00.000-05:00

Kanbanfor1

I had run across nomad8’s Kanbanfor1 physical boards at an Agile conference during the previous

year. While one part of my brain looked at them and thought, "Wow, they are really charging a lot (about $28) for something I could put together myself on a chalkboard, whiteboard or refrigerator for $0. It was difficult for this part of my brain to get a message through edge-wise because the other part of my brain was drowning it out. The other part of my brain apparently thinks if I amass a certain volume of apps designed to “improve” my productivity I will somehow magically be transformed into some hyper productive version of myself that can work a 16 hour day, spend several hours of quality time with my wife and daughter at night and still manage to get something called “a full night’s rest”. That part of my brain was shouting BUY THAT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW!"

Fortunately, I was able to talk myself down… probably by spending the same insane amount of money on a book I haven’t read.

When I found the app for the iPad though… I really compelled to test it out. And, it is very pretty to look at. I used it for several weeks… or rather, I tried to, did I mention it is very pretty to look at? This posting will concern it self with my review of the app. (Next week I’ll talk about what happened in between my attempts to get my world sorted with Kanbanfor1.)

The app has updated since I began testing it, so some of my concerns may have gone addressed already. I also think it is important to state up front that the issues I had with the application are not really problems with the application, they are problems with my approach to work.

The Basics

Kanbanfor1 is laid out in a very clean, basic way. You get boxes for the following:

Things to Do
Next
Doing
Waiting
Done
Notes

You also get a trashcan where you put the notes when they reach a state of whatever comes after done… ascended maybe?

The app is about as basic and simple to use as it could possibly be. There is a box with a “+” sign in the top left of the screen. Click it, and you get a New Task pop-up. You enter the task description, select from one of 6 colors for your task and click Done. The task shows up in the Things to Do column. You can move it across the board. That’s it. That is all it does. I love that. It is what made me want to try it. ... (Once I came to grips with the fact that if there is a Kanban app that allows for online/offline access with sync. I am unable to locate it.)

I placed a task of each color in the notes field and used the names from the swim lanes on my physical board. I then replicated all the tasks from my board into Kanbanfor1. As far as I know, there is no capacity for WIP limits in this app… it is bare bones, but kind of elegant in its’ simplicity.

(And did I mention it is pretty?)

While I knew this was going to be an issue, I underestimated how annoying it would become. What I store on my iPad is only available on the iPad. This is great when I’m teaching a class or sitting on the couch, with my iPad. This is completely useless when I am trudging through an airport with a ridiculous amount of luggage. So, in those moments, I’m back to Things…, which I then re-enter into Kanbanfor1.

This lack of constant access didn’t seem to me like it should be a big deal. In practice though, I noticed that rather than updating as I go, which I do with the physical board, I was just not doing that with the app on my iPad. I ended up just capturing things at the end of the day. A subtle difference, but it meant that when I was posting the updates, I was having to look through all the tasks, figure out which ones I had completed and move them from Things to Do into Done. I lost the value that comes from the staged movement, and I lost the boost from moving it into Done when I completed it.

What was a more significant issue for me was the fact that there is no ability to change the size of the

board. Sure, you can pinch and zoom, but it just makes the stickies larger too. If you have 10-20 things to do, this board is great. If your backlog has 30-40 things in it, this board is tough to work with. At least if you are going for that whole big, visible information radiator thing. In order to get all my tasks on the board I had to create stacks. So, in "Things to Do" I have a stack of things I have to do for work. There may be 10 things in there, I have to just stack them up, maintaining priority is not easy – you have to unstack the tasks one by one, and then restack them. (If you happen to suffer from something in the neighborhood of OCD, you are looking forward to hours spend restacking tasks in priority every time you want to work in a new item.)

So what I end up with (sans the WIP limits) is stacks in each of the boxes. While I love the simplicity and I think the way the app is designed makes a lot of sense, for someone who is carrying a lot of tasks, this board will simply not work. I think if there were some capacity to manage the height of the boxes, or the size of the tasks, it may work better. Unfortunately, at least while I was testing it, this was not the case. If, however, I had a more manageable set of Things to Do, and I was always going to have my iPad with me (the way I do my phone), I think this app would be a perfectly fine solution… even without the syncing.

Help Wanted

If anyone who reads this can recommend an app that offers online and offline access with a sync to reconcile changes, that is available on IOS, please let me know. I have been researching them, but so far, it is all about the cloud. I think the cloud is great, but when I’m stuck in the actual clouds for several hours at a time, I need to be able to enter new items and make updates.

Personal Kanban Week 6

2013-04-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

What if you mix the mayonnaise in the can, WITH the tunafish?

By week 6 I felt like I had begun to get the hang of a basic working practice of doing Personal Kanban using a physical board. I definitely still had room for improvement, but I felt ready to start on the next phase of this experiment - tracking the work using an electronic board. Another reason I wanted to begin this phase was that I was about to begin traveling and teaching again.

The questions I initially had about this were:

Could I maintain the working habits I had established using an electronic board?
Could I find a tool that was as easy for me to use as a physical board?
Could I fit all the work I was carrying on to the physical board?
Could I find a tool that would allow me to work in an offline mode and have any changes I made sync up when I went back online?

There were a number of concerns I had about each of these questions.

Maintaining Working Habits

When I am teaching Scrum classes or coaching I always advocate starting out with a physical practice of working with a board on the wall whenever possible. There are two primary reasons for this.

The first is that when people are adopting an Agile practice, doing the work with physical tools allows the practitioners to develop their own working version of Scrum. Once they have established their practice, they gain clarity on what they need a tool to do for them. If they begin with an electronic tool, they learn to work the way the tool works. Each of the tools offers it’s own take on Agile and this may, or may not work to the benefit of the practitioner, but more often than not I’ve seen people rely on the tool to drive their habits (or provide them with an excuse for not applying some aspect of a practice.)

The second reason is that while it may not seem like a big deal, there is a psychological boost that comes from walking up to a board and moving a card into the Done column. It’s not a huge boost, but it is a good feeling to physically do that. If you can do it multiple times a day, there is an increased sense of accomplishment and this helps drive the practice. While I do think there is also a boost from doing the same in electronic form, I have not personally found that to be as positive an experience.

Ease of Use

Since I was still in the beginning stages of training myself to work this way, I wanted to make sure I would be able to find a tool that would allow me to maintain the good habits I was developing, while allowing me to continue to experiment. I also wanted to make sure that the process of creating a task, or moving a task would be as simple/easy as writing something down on a post it and moving it across a physical board. My assumption was that if the tool proved to be more complicated to use than a physical board, I would be less likely to maintain or improve on the habits I was developing. Anytime using software becomes more difficult to use than paper it makes work harder. That would obviously work against my goal for this entire project.

Fitting it All In

When I made the decision to try to include everything I do on the board my board became pretty crowded. I even had to switch to smaller post its in order to be able to fit everything. My goal was to find a tool that would allow me to keep all the work in one place, but it also had to be stored in a way that was big and visible enough for me to be able to see everything all at once.

Off the Grid

This was the biggest challenge for me. I have spent the last two + years teaching myself how to stop letting things slip through the cracks by relying on Things and Evernote. Both of these tools allow me to work on multiple devices and then have changes sync up when I reconnect. Basically, whenever I think of something I need to do, or encounter information I expect to need later, my goal is to get that thing out of my head and into something more responsible than me as quickly as possible. I have too much to do and sometimes I forget stuff. I’m also often easily distracted by the “OH LOOK A SQUIRREL!” factor, and I get ideas and find information in odd places when I am not connected. In working this way I have definitely developed a habit of putting more in Things than I can do, but this has helped me keep things from completely slipping through the cracks. Several times a day I review the list of items I have placed in the Today section of Things to clean it up. I do end up moving deadlines on tasks quite a bit, but having them there at least helps remind me that they are there and probably should be dealt with at some point. I also periodically review the items that have moved out of Today into Someday and do my best to cull the herd.

Evernote is like the junk drawer for my brain. It allows me the freedom to fully engage my inner Bill Blazejowski. All the ideas, notes, pictures of weird things that are momentarily important to me for some unknown reason, the books I want to read, and voice notes from “Chuck to remind Bill to SHUT UP!” go in there. There’s a good chance many of those things will get no further than being stuck in Evernote and left to electronically wither… but I do feel more at ease knowing that I have them... just in case.

The problem is, that Personal Kanban seems to be largely focused on reducing the amount of cultter (stuff I’m trying to work on) and moving to an electronic version may make it tough to continue embracing my inner digital hoarder. Six weeks in, I’ve still not been able to break from using Things every day just to capture stuff that may need to be added to the backlog. It may be dysfunctional, but my addiction to storing everything in a place more reliable than my own head is something I’ve been working on developing for a long time. It is definitely more appealing to me than going back to forgetting things I need to do. I was not sure how much of that I’d be able to let go of, or if doing so was even necessary.

So one of my goals for Sprint 6 was to select a tool and start testing. The first tool I decided to try was Kanban For 1. I’ll be posting about that beginning next week.

Personal Kanban Week 5

2013-03-26T11:59:00.000-05:00

Working on mysteries without any clues

As I’ve been working though trying to adopt this practice, there are questions that have emerged for me. These are questions I don't have answers for...yet. Some are simple, some, not so much. Some fall outside the bounds of Kanban and may be more relevant to general personal productivity. And some of these questions are probably just me getting my obsessive compulsive on.

[cough] Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? [/cough]

Next week I will begin writing about what happened when I tried moving from a physical Kanban board to an electronic one. Before I start on that, I thought it would be a good idea to create a backlog of all the questions I don’t have answers to so far.

How do I assess “value” in a way that can be applied across all the items on my board if I am tracking both personal and work related items. For example, generating a proposal for a 10 million dollar project seems to have value from the perspective of revenue, improving skill at writing proposals and most likely other areas as well. Having a recurring task to exercise or meditate each day seems to have some value because these are tasks that result in improved

mental and physical health – which enables me to be more creative and productive. Sitting on my butt for an hour (re)watching old episodes of Firely and eating an inappropriate amount of potato chips may appear to have no value, but I do believe that the slack time, when we are being unproductive and just zoning out for a bit, is important too. How can I measure/understand value across these three types of activities in a way that is uniform enough to let me compare them to one another?
I’ve slowly been learning that for me, the value of WIP limits is not just to enable me to focus, but also to keep me from being overwhelmed by all there is to do. When I have loaded up my board with everything I can think of that I need to do, it is too much too look at, very difficult to prioritize and it ends up working against me.

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." Oscar Wilde

There is a tax on productivity that comes from the mental overhead of trying to cope with too much at once. In addition to the fatigue of trying to understand it all at once, there is a sense of guilt or shame that crops up when I find things that have been on the board too long. This productivity guilt can have a brutal impact on my ability to get things done. I’m learning that I can only have so many things in play at once, so I limit what I put on my board. This is fine. I understand this practice and I’m working on getting better at it. But this doesn’t solve my problem. My problem is that I just have too much stuff to do. I can limit the amount I let into the board. But there is still an ocean of stuff waiting outside the club on the wrong side of the velvet rope. It’s been standing there a long time, patiently waiting to get in. Some of it may not be important enough to get in, some of it may need to be culled from the herd. But some of that stuff is important. Either way, I’ve got the mental overhead and the productivity guilt from all that stuff that is out there waiting. It leaves me feeling like I’m only creating the illusion of making progress with becoming more productive. So… what do I do about all the stuff outside the board? Do I need a backlog for my backlog?
I am not tracking how long anything spends in queue for any of my work. I do not have any idea what my velocity is. At the moment, this does not seem to matter, but I am afraid I may be missing something here.
Can I swarm? I’m only one man. I can only do one thing at a time, but there are things that crop up that require (or want) immediate and uninterrupted attention. I recently ran into that with the scope of something I thought would take 2 hours exploded into a 4-day project. It completely crushed the value of this process for 4 days. And this also applies to non-work items. Baseball season is starting and I’d like to spend some time really studying up on the details for the players for some of the teams so that I can have a deeper understanding of what is happening when the actual season begins. This is a time investment that would put other things on hold. Obviously the value question comes into play here, but so does the impact on other work. Do I need to track how other things that are impacted by swarming? If so, does that mean I need to weigh the value of swarming on X against not swarming on X and continuing to make progress on other items? At what point does this become so complicated that it loses value for me as an approach to being productive?
My workspace is still a disaster. Oh wait... that was a wee bit too negative. My workspace is still "organization in flux". It is in a constant state of “I’m getting ready to go on the road” or “I just got back from being on the road”. I'm having a very difficult time employing 5S. Does this matter? How is this impacting my productivity?
Does the fact that I am still using Things to quickly capture items that are later added to the board matter? Is this serving as my backlog’s backlog? Is that a bad thing?
Why does all this make me feel like Hal the obsessive-compulsive vampire?

Podcast Interview with Personal Kanban author Jim Benson

2013-03-26T11:12:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago I had the chance to interview Jim Benson (@ourfounder), one of the authors of Personal Kanban.

You can check out the interview on Projects at Work.

Jim Benson Interview Part 1
Jim Benson Interview Part 2

Personal Kanban Week 3

2013-03-12T02:03:00.000-05:00

Off the Rails…

It was all going so very well. By the start of the 3^rd week I was beginning to get the hang of the process. I wasn’t a shining model of productivity, but I was certainly making improvements. I was learning a lot about how I worked and what I needed to do to become more productive. I had started making notes about all the experiments I wanted to run in the coming weeks. I was keeping my PK Journal up to date. The only issue was that I hadn’t tried it with real work yet because I was also still on staycation. (I travel a lot for work, so when it comes to vacation, I’m totally happy to just spend the time at home becoming fully present with what a bad decision it was for someone who is horribly allergic to cats to adopt three of them.) Being at home for the first part of this experiment had allowed me to establish the physical habits of personal kanban and my hope was that this would keep me rooted in the practice once I was on the road again.

So naturally, the obvious next step was to completely screw that all up.

I had planned to be away on a retreat for a few days during the 3^rd week. While I was there I picked up a slight cold that immediately turned me into a walker for about 8 days. Both of these events meant that for a period of almost 2 weeks, I was completely unable to do work on anything on my board.

Failure Bow

So… time for a Failure Bow

(If you aren't familiar with the Failure Bow, I'd like to recommend watching the Matt Smith TED talk below.)

While it would be easy to rip myself up for losing step, I knew that was going to happen at some point. What I was more interested in was what it would take for me to recover when it did happen.

Since I’d been keeping detailed notes on what was and was not working I turned to those to try and see what issues were causing the biggest trouble.

“Hi, My name is Dave… and I’m a Things-aholic.”

I was still using Things every day. I was recording tasks on my board and working them, but there were additional items in Things that I worked on and they never made it to the Kanban board. Most of them were personal items, but it did seem kinda of pointless to me to be working with two tools at once. It just divided my focus and make getting anything done that much more complicated.

I decided that I was going to start capturing everything I do on the board. I took everything listed in Things and created a post it for each item. I sorted and grouped the whole thing on my Kanban board. My plan was to try and go one week without using Things. During that time I would rely 100% on the Kanban board.

I made some modifications to the layout of my board as well. I added blocked boxes for some of the swimlanes and also made adjustments to my WIP limits.

I decided that I would start each day with (re)prioritization

I had learned that travel can have a very negative impact on working this way. I had a number of jobs coming up that would require travel. So, I decided to start researching electronic tools so I could test one out during my next trip.

One of the things I have found to be invaluable in this whole process is having the physical board to return to when things break down. There have been a number of events and situations that resulted in me needing to reset my approach. I’ll be posting about them in the coming weeks. For anyone who is going to try personal kanban, my first advice would be to start out with a physical board and develop good habits with your practice. These will be an important touchstone for you as you work through the changes this approach will have on your work.

The final thing that came out of my retrospective for iterations 3 and 4, was a new question… what should I do about recurring tasks? Was it really going to be worth creating post-its for recurring each item so that there was a card for each one on each day of the week? That seemed ridiculous. I had no answer, but sometimes, just having the question is a good start.

Girl Scout Kanban

2013-03-05T00:33:00.003-06:00

I’ve been writing for a few weeks now about my Personal Kanban Experiment, but actually, it isn’t just MY experiment. My whole family began using Kanban last December and at the start of the new year my wife and I spent a day teaching the basics of Kanban to a small group of Girl Scouts.

One of the main things I do for a living is teaching Agile. I’ve also been teaching people how to manage technology projects using more traditional methods for about 15 years. While I will (hopefully) never say I am expert at it, I do believe I have a fairly good handle on the types of things that make it difficult for people to learn this stuff. I come to each class hopeful, but also ready for the struggles that sometimes come with helping people learn a different way of working. That being said, there has been absolutely nothing I have seen in 15 years of teaching that could have prepared me for that Saturday in January that my wife and I spent at the local Girl Scout HQ.

Among her many other accomplishments, my wife is a Girl Scout Leader and a teacher. She’s never taught Agile before, but she has taught Project Management and she’s been working on a Kanban experiment of her own. When my wife first asked me about doing the class together I was very excited about it. For one, my she is my favorite person to work with but also, I saw this as a chance to start teaching Agile to a group of young women who were already training to be leaders in whatever they go on to do in life. More importantly, this was a chance to teach them Agile BEFORE they learned waterfall. I was/am giddy at the possibilities this presents for them when they enter the workforce. My wife was already pretty familiar with all of the kids who attended our class. I was only familiar with one of them – my daughter. And, as the day drew closer, the terror over teaching kids instead of adults took hold. I was worried that my stories wouldn’t resonate, I knew most of my jokes wouldn’t work and I was pretty sure that at some point I’d slip up and my language would include phrasing that was perhaps a bit to colorful, or just plain weird for the room.

Still, with the possible exception of properly loading the dishwasher, I completely trust my wife and she’s had a lot of experience at trying to keep me from being an idiot, so my plan was to try and do my best to adapt the things I normally teach so that they’d make sense for the Girl Scouts. We started the day by explaining the basics of Kanban to them. We talked about what a Kanban was, where it came from, how we wanted to have a board with three columns in it. We talked about WIP limits and agreed on some basic numbers we would test out. Then we talked about populating and prioritizing the backlog. AND THAT IS WHERE IT GOT WEIRD!

When I teach CSM classes we spend a good bit of time talking about and around the Product Backlog before we actually build one. We discuss a variety of prioritization techniques and the various merits of different ways of sizing work. Even though it is something we ease our way into, for many, it is still a struggle. However, take a small group of 12-15 year old Girl Scouts, and tell them this:

We need a list of all the stuff we want to get done in this session today. We need to list each thing on a separate post-it and put it up here in the column we’ve labeled Product Backlog. Then, we need to figure out which stuff is most important and organize the stuff in the backlog from most important to least important. We can change our minds about the order later, but we need to know what to start with now.

After you utter these four sentences, you may have to be prepared to spend a few minutes brainstorming with them to generate the list. You may also have to establish working agreements (should we list bathroom break, or not?). But, within about 5-7 minutes, you’ve got a full backlog that has been prioritized based on the collective agreement of a group of kids who have all eagerly, and actively participated in the process.

I thought my head was going to explode.

And then, it got even weirder as the Agile-ish behavior took hold…

As they began pulling items from the Ready column into the Doing column, the girls self organized into small groups. (Apparently young Girl Scouts know how to do this instinctively… there may be a badge.)

Then, as they were working, one of the girls was hungry… well, ok.. she wasn’t hungry… she was ABSOLUTELY STARVING TO DEATH! She expressed her need It was acknowledged by the other teams. They examined the board and realized that the only way to pull Lunch into the doing column was to complete one of the tasks that was being worked on. That fact established, they swarmed on the task that was closest to done so that they could move it over and pull Lunch into doing in order to save the life of their team member. With respect to swarming, I’m accustomed to seeing adults have a rational adult discussion about whether or not to swarm, and if so, what to swarm on. I’m completely not familiar with the insane idea that humans could just look at a board of Kanbans, identify the item without discussion and swarm on it without having to talk/debate about it first.

The rest of the day was filled with similar types of experiences. Because we wanted to give them a way to measure their progress towards completing the items in their backlog, we taught them to use a burndown chart… which they updated vigilantly every 30 minutes. Each time a group finished an item on the board, they ALL walked up to move it over together because they were part of a team and wanted to celebrate in the accomplishment.

I was at a loss. Where was the frustration, the anger, and the arguments? The blind panic at the idea that items that need to be addressed were not going to be the responsibility of one person (who we could hurl under bus if/when necessary). My wife and I were discussing the freak-ish behavior we were seeing… wondering when, why and how it is that this open-ness gets removed from the equation, and more importantly, how we could stop that from ever happening. It was a truly amazing day.

I often say that I learn more from the students than they learn from me. Never was this more true than the day my wife and I spent teaching Girl Scouts about Kanban. Not only did I get a lightbulb upside the head with the understanding that this open, collaborative way of working was something that wasn’t born into them, but I came away with the understanding that, left to their own devices, the Agile-ness is already there. IMHO, what we have to do is find a way to help kids sharpen their Agile nature it and find a way to protect it from the waterfall.

My wife and I are now preparing for a longer project to help provide more agile training and coaching for some of these young ladies as they begin working towards their Gold Award. (The Gold Award is the highest achievement a Girl Scout can attain. It is the Girl Scout’s equivalent of the Boy Scout’s Eagle Scout.) For each of them this will involve managing complex projects that span several months and involve multiple teams on a variety of efforts. I the Kanban training is any kind of indicator, this is going to be an amazing learning experience for all of us.

Personal Kanban Week 2

2013-02-25T13:10:00.001-06:00

Up Jumped the Devil

Robert Johnson

I been studyin' the rain and
I'm 'on drive my blues away
Robert Johnson "Preachin Blues (Up Jumped the Devil)"

In the second week of this experiment I added a separate post it to the board with specific goals I had for the week. These are things that in some cases included other work elements on the board, but in some cases not. To me, this was bigger picture stuff I wanted to accomplish. Being as I was on vacation, these were 50% work related and 50% personal. I didn’t accomplish all the goals initially, but this was my first step towards that. (And hopefully someday soon I will finish learning to play that Robert Johnson song.)

One of the “benefits” of Agile is not that it makes things go faster, but that it makes things you might otherwise overlook much more obvious that you can’t avoid making a choice about them one way or another. For me, this whole process has involved learning a lot about how I (personally) get things done, what motivates me, and as I’ve already mentioned, some of the dysfunction I have built into my work routines.

I should also mention that, for better or worse, I don’t keep a very strict distinction between work life and personal life. I love what I do, so none of what I do is WORK in the sense that it’s stuff I don’t want to do, but there are things that provide me with greater personal satisfaction than others. And at the same time, there is also a kind of negative weight that gloms on to the work items are inherently pleasure-neutral, but become negative because they sit around too long. (This is something I’ll be coming back to in a few weeks when I start digging more into value.)
So, my top observations I have noted for week 2…

Prioritize the Personal - On the days when I did the things that provided personal satisfaction first, I was much happier. This is something I learned in mid-20s living in NYC. If I got up early enough to practice my guitar and hit the gym before going into work, I was pretty much okay with wherever the day took me. I’d seen to my personal stuff and that was not sitting around competing with work, waiting to be done. Understanding that this is important and actually doing it are very different things. I have found that I have to actually force myself to do (some of ) the personal stuff first. My tendency is to just dive right into the work because I perceive that need as being more important… which is not always the case.
Naps are good – In the grand scheme of things I’m definitely in the “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” camp. Generally I average about 4-5 hours a night. It is not a healthy way to live… but it is a choice I make happily each day. I don’t stay up because I have to, I stay up because there is just too much I want to do. There are, however, many negative side effects to living like this and if you make a choice to live functionally sleep deprived, you have to learn how to deal with it. For me, the mid afternoon has always been a dead zone… unless I find a way to sneak in a 20-minute nap in there somewhere. It’s like hitting CTRL-ALT-DELETE on your ability to focus.

Also, on the sleep topic, I am finding that meditating for 20-30 minutes before going to sleep at night is having a massive impact on the quality of my sleep. The only hitch is I have to do this before I am too tired to meditate without drifting off to sleep.
Down Days – In tracking how I am working, I’m becoming more aware of something I have suspected for quite awhile… I have some days of very high productivity, but they are often followed by days of very low productivity. I’ve not tried to measure this, but I’m noticing, on average, I have about 1 day during the work-week where I am far less productive than the others. Typically, this happens after one of those days where I work into the wee hours and am amazed at my productivity. Since I’m not tracking it, I can’t say for certain, but it does seem like an ebb and flow kind of thing. I’m okay with that for now.

So the most important things I learned in the second week have nothing much to do with Kanban. As far as my practice of using the board, I’m getting better at not obsessing about the cards, but I am maintaining discipline with moving them. I’ve abandoned my attempts to keep them all color coordinated because it doesn’t seem to matter right now – a card is a card.

One issue I do have is that I’m still depending on Things and I’m still working items I enter into Things that I don’t have on my board. This should not be necessary, but I see three main reasons for it:

My Kanban board is not always with me, my iPhone (with Things) is.
Over the past few years, Things has become a deeply ingrained part of how I work. I’m habitually and emotionally invested in it – as much as Evernote.
I’m still afraid things will slip through the cracks. Things is part of how I mitigate that risk.

I’d like to break myself of the Things habit and just do Kanban, but I’m going to have to find a way to do it that is as simple as my use of Things.

I am reprioritizing my board every morning and every afternoon. This is probably overkill, but I am still becoming familiar with the work.

I have accomplished some major work items that were not on the board or in my goals. I would like to become better at making sure everything is on the board.

There is one other major change I have noticed since I began using the board. I added a post it last week to remind myself to spend time playing Dungeons and Dragons with my daughter each day. At first, that seemed horrible to me – what kind of crap father must I be if I have to make a task card to play with my kid. But you know what… since I’ve put that card up there. She and I have played every day for 1-2 hours. And it’s awesome. We spend time together, having creative fun, I’m not working and she’d not lost in some video game. So, while my original goal of taking Personal Kanban on was to get better at managing the things I have to do at work, what I’m finding is that it is helping me get better at managing the things I have to do that are not work. This is resulting in me enjoying my life more, making more time for the things I need to do keep sane and making time for my family. My expectation is that this will also have a much greater positive impact on my life as a knowledge worker than I would get from just having a better way to juggle too much at once.

Individual Capacity Calculator

2013-02-19T01:01:00.003-06:00

(This is an update to my 10/28/12 post on How to Avoid Overcommitment During Sprint Planning. )

For awhile now I have been using an excel spreadsheet I put together to work out the calculations I detailed in the post on avoiding overcommitment. I have also been sharing it with the students in my CSM classes. I recently updated it so that the times allocated for the different Scrum meetings is in sync with the current version of the Scrum Guide and I thought it would be a good idea to post here just in case it can be of help to anyone.

In case you missed the earlier post, the intention of this calculator is to help individual team members on a Scrum Team gain a better (more true) understanding of the amount of time the can realistically commit/forecast to be able to contribute to the work the team will do during a Sprint. I have found this to be very helpful for teams who are struggling with understanding their capacity.

An example of how this could be used in s Sprint Planning is...

1. Once a Scrum Team has forecasted the amount of Story Points it can expect to get through during a given Sprint based on average historical velocity.

2. And defined tasks for all the stories.

3. And estimated the ideal engineering hours required to complete each individual task.

4. And totalled up the collective ideal engineering hours required to complete all the work they are forecasting to complete in the Sprint.

5. Each team member can use this calculator to determine how much time he/she can expect to be able to contribute in the Sprint.

6. Once each team member has come up with his/her number, you would total those up to get the total amount of ideal engineering hours the Team expects to be able to working during the Sprint.

7. If the value resulting from Step 4 is greater than the value from Step 6, then you may need to reconsider the amount of work your team is forecasting to complete in the Sprint, or modify the scope (and tasks) for one of the stories.

8. If the value resulting from Step 4 is significantly less than the value resulting from Step 6, you may need to consider adding some additional stories/work into what is being forecasted for the Sprint.

* Some teams I have worked with have taken the additional step of applying this technique by work type within a Sprint, i.e. Development, QA, UX, etc.

Here is the file

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Personal Kanban - Week 1

2013-02-12T09:00:00.000-06:00

This Dysfunction Goes to Eleven

When this experiment started one of my goals for the first time box/iteration was just to see if I could actually give up my Things task list and follow the practice with a board. I had tried a number of other productivity frameworks and found that only pieces of them stuck. (Someday someone will write on a book on how to finish David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book and I’ll actually get all the way through it.) And while I know that limiting work in progress is a cornerstone of this type of approach, and I did set WIP limits, I decided to be a little loose with the limits since I was just guessing at what they should be.

Because my larger plan is to test out different approaches to Personal Kanban, I wanted to start as simply as I could manage. I created a task board and began to fill it with post-its. The first lesson I learned was that I had far too much in my to do list to fit on my Kanban board. I decided to limit it to the things that seemed to be the most important at the time.

The Architect of my Own Demise

The most basic way to set up my board would have been to create three columns: On Deck, Doing and Done. I know this. However, when I sat down to work on it, I began struggling with how I would be able to visually understand the different types of things I had to do. My plan was to use this not just for work, but for my whole life. So, I made a decision to start with multiple swim-lanes. This is a choice I can’t say I was entirely comfortable with. It seems to violate (my current understanding of) one of the basic premises under which this system is designed to work. But… (I bargain with myself) baby steps. I decided that this would be an okay thing to try while I am working on coming up with a better solution.

I started off by dividing my Backlog up into 5 swim-lanes, each feeding into it’s own On Deck and Doing columns (instead of having just one of each). I was able to limit myself to one column for Done though. The reason for this is that there were/are so many things I felt compelled to work on that I was afraid if I put them all in one box, without some kind of designation, I’d lose sight of something critical. (Yes, I realize this is a broken way to look at it.) There was also a part of me that was curious about how I would work through the prioritized items once they hit the On Deck boxes. The swim-lanes I set up were:

Work-ish: Obviously for things somewhat related to work
Reading (later changed to Reading and Research): self explanatory
SA/IT2: for work/volunteering I do for the Scrum Alliance and IT2
Personal Daily: These are things I do every day that I track
Personal: Personal projects and tasks I need to take care of

So here is my basic organizational system:

Even with the swim lanes I was still concerned about understanding the tasks on the board. Not so much from a priority standpoint, because I can handle that pretty easily with the On Deck backlogs. The desire for clarity is more about having a visual way to quickly understand that a given task is related to (work, personal, reading, etc.) This should have been easily handled by the swim-lanes, but there were sub groups I felt I needed to identify even within the lanes. So, I began with a variety of different sized and colored post-its, each one loosely designated to belong to some kind of additional detail on a task.

One of my challenges was (and continues to be) defining “value”. I believe the multi-colored, multi-sized post-its are part of trying to define that. There are tasks that obviously provide direct value to customers, like send Client X a demo license. There are items which provide indirect value to my ability to do my job: Read the new book by Diana Larsen book, “Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams and Projects”. There is work I do volunteering for organizations which provides value for others: Review submissions for Scrum Gathering. But there are other things I do which appear to be valuable only from the perspective of their impact on my body, brain or mood. How to capture this value in relationship to other items in the list continues to be a struggle and is one of the reasons for the multiple swim-lanes in my board. (How for example do I quantify and prioritize based on value if what I am comparing is the value of sending a client a demo license, compared to the mental health boost I get from meditating each day, or maybe just sitting back to read a comic book for fun.

It would be easy to argue that the non-work items do not provide value to a client and do not need to go on the board. But that seems to me to be a pretty thin definition of value. My goal was to try to put everything on the board. The problem was, it didn’t all fit. . One of the most important things I learned that week was that if I don’t put it on the board, it isn’t going to happen. So, I needed a kind of backlog nursery, where I could dump ideas and then periodically replenish the backlog on the board from that nursery.

I decided to hold a little personal retrospective at the end of each week to evaluate how things are going. The first week was really difficult for me, not because following the process was hard – that was actually pretty easy. The hard part was that Nigel Tufnel stopped by to crank the volume on my “obsessive tendencies” up to 11. Here are the important (and painful) things I learned about myself during week 1.

While some of the PK books will tell you to plan to do the unpleasant work first and then work your way towards the stuff you want to do, I found that if I don’t force myself to do the things I want to do, that I cram every possible minute full of the not-fun work and never get around to the enjoyable, recharge-oriented items on my list. (Remember, this is my vacation too.) I actually had to block out time to stop being productive and just sit around and read a book or play my guitar for fun.
I was so focused on getting the items across my board as efficiently and quickly as possible that I actually spent a few nights tossing and turning in a restless series of dreams about the board, the tasks and how to move them. (The last time I had dreams like this was during my brief, but disturbing addiction to playing Doom and Quake. Unfortunately, this time I didn’t get to wake up and grab the BFG to kill off some monsters.)
In my crowning moment of idiocy that week, I climbed off the treadmill halfway through a long workout because I realized I had not moved the card into the doing column. I was unable to continue the workout until I had the car in the right column. (Yes, I have issues.)
Throughout the week I found I was still using Things. As eager as I was to embrace the new system, I was still afraid to let go of the method I had developed in order to keep things from slipping through the cracks.

At the end of the first week, I know I have a long way to go. I’m nowhere near ready to deal with WIP, the waste I am creating or finding a better way of doing this. But, it’s a start. And, by the end of the week I was able to start talking myself down off the ledge of obsessing about moving the cards....

But, they say admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.

Here is a snapshot of my board as I got ready to start on the 2nd week.

The Drunken PM meets Personal Kanban

2013-01-26T16:23:00.000-06:00

For the past 18 years I have been developing my skills at helping people manage the work they have to do into a state of ninja-like perfection-ish. As I have progressed in my career I have had the good fortune to work on projects of varying size, duration and cost. Some have been successful, but more have not – and that is okay because those are the ones where I’ve learned the most. To demonstrate my proficiency in my chosen profession I have obtained multiple certifications to prove I know how to manage work in both a traditional approach and an Agile approach. I’ve even spent years teaching others how to get those same certifications. Along the way I also got an MBA to demonstrate… whatever it is an MBA is actually supposed to demonstrate beyond that I am willing to be in debt until I go to my grave. And I’ve given up thousands of hours of personal time leading volunteer organizations that focus in managing work and teaching people how to get better at it.

After all that, I feel it is fair to say I am fairly well versed in how to manage projects and I’m pretty good at it. My experiences have taught me many things… most of them the hard way. And with this, I have found only one single truth that spans all of it:

Being skilled at helping others manage their work is no guarantee you will demonstrate any level of skill at managing your own.

In fact, I think it is fair to say I pretty much suck at managing my own work. I’m not saying I am not good at getting things done. I get stuff done all day long, and usually, it is the most important stuff. But I’m not good at managing it.

When I started working in project management, this was not a problem. It was 1995. I did not have a cell phone. I had one email account and I could log into AOL from home or work via my 14.4 modem. There was literally only so much information I could access in a day. Compared to now, the information overhead I faced on a daily basis was pretty light. My weekly to do list usually looked something like this:

This is a sheet of notebook paper folded in half 3 times, so that each side contains 8 boxes just like the one above. When the section of the paper got too crowded, I’d copy the open items to a new section and start again. A single sheet of paper torn from a notebook could usually take care of my list of to-dos for 2-3 weeks. (This was how we did things back in the olden days before the Palm III.)

And now, as I am writing this, blog posting about having too much to do, Things has 170 items in it waiting for me to get to. Granted, they aren’t all due today but it is so many that even trying to manage what I am not going to do has become pretty much impossible. I’ve tried many different approaches and finally reached a point where I thought I had it sorted. At that point, my goal, with any single piece of information, was to get it out of my head and into something more responsible as fast as possible. For me, this means put it in Things if it is an action I have to take care of, in Evernote if it does not go in Things and on those occasions where I am not able to access electronics, I have my overpriced Field Notes notebook and one of those weird sticks that ink comes out of. With this I have gotten very good at making sure I capture everything worth capturing. But dealing with it after… that is where things get wonky.

This past December I found myself in the bizarre position of having to take a whole month off from work. It was that or lose the vacation time. While I’d expect this would sound like a truly wonderful opportunity to most people, it scared the crap out of me. The problem was, I had so many things I wanted to do during my vacation that I was pretty sure I’d end up just curling up in a ball on the couch and watching all 10 seasons of MI-5 again just to avoid having to pick which thing I was going to take on first.

As much as I love MI-5, I didn’t think I’d be able to cope with losing Tom, Zoey and Danny again, so I decided to do something about it. And, since one of the main things I do for a living is teaching Agile, I decided to practice what I preach and started getting set up to give Personal Kanban a try.

I’m writing this after 5 weeks of my own attempt at Personal Kanban. I've been holding a retrospective once a week and keeping a journal on how it is going. My current plan is to keep working with it and experimenting with different practices to see what works for me and what doesn’t. I’ll be posting back to this blog about once every two weeks with updates on what I’ve learned and what I’m going to try next.

A friend of mine once told me that when he met with new clients about Agile Transformation, he tried to focus on making sure they understood that Agile was not going to make them faster, but it would make the broken ugly things so obvious that they’d have no choice but to deal with them. I’ve seen that happen over and over in my own work. I am happy (and totally annoyed) to report that the exact same thing happens when you apply the practices at a personal level.

If you are interested in learning more about how to apply Kanban to managing your personal work, you might try Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry.

How to Avoid Overcommitment During Sprint Planning

2012-10-28T00:21:00.002-05:00

Awhile back I was working on an Agile coaching gig with Tom Smallwood. We were working with a team that moving to Scrum and was having a particularly difficult time meeting their commitments. Stories were being estimated in Story Points using the Fibonacci sequence and they were breaking stories down into tasks that were then estimated in ideal engineering hours. Stories were (mostly) small enough to go from card on wall to potentially shippable in about 2 days. Tasks were kept to between 4 and 12 hours. Unfortunately, despite following the basic guidelines we were giving them, they were still WAY over committing each Sprint.

Tom was the first one to notice that even though they were all confident in their ability to get the work done at the end of a Sprint Planning meeting, what they were confident about was in fact, completely impossible. What was happening was that each person was assumed to have a capacity of 8 ideal engineering hours per day. Since we were working in two-week iterations, this meant each person was on the hook for 80 hours of productive working time in a Sprint.

The way we addressed this initially was to ask them to plan for no more than 6 productive working hours per person each day. This helped, but it still wasn't cutting it. The problem was that each person had more that they were responsible for than just the project we were working on. (Yes, this is not ideal, but it was reality at the time.)

The solution we came up with was very simple and it is one I have used on every team I worked with since. It adds an extra step to the Sprint Planning ceremony, but it has been invaluable in helping teams understand their capacity and preventing over commitment.

(Disclaimer - this involves using relative Story Point Estimation for Stories and Ideal Engineering Hours for Tasks. There are many who do things differently and have great success - which is awesome... what follows is just what I have found to work well for me and the teams I've worked with.)

What we added was a step in the 2nd half of Sprint Planning. After the team has taken the User Stories (estimated in Story Points) and broken them down into Tasks (estimated in Ideal Engineering Hours), we would go around the circle and ask each team member to estimate how many ideal engineering hours he/she could commit to being responsible for in the upcoming Sprint. One of the most critical parts of this is the idea that the commitment being made is not to the PO, but to the other members of the development/engineering team. So, if I tell my team I'm good for 35 hours, then my team can count on me to be responsible for 35 hours of task work. If I commit to that and do not contribute that amount of time, my team members will have to cover for the work I've not done. While this should go without saying, I have found it to be helpful to mention when starting this part of Sprint Planning.

So, going around the circle, each team member has to be aware of how much time they can commit to contributing. This means they need to account for a lot of the things that get in their way.

Here is how I normally coach people to think through this:

In a two-week iteration, you begin with 10 working days. However, I normally block out 1 day for Sprint Planning, 1 day for the Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective, 1/4 day for the 8 remaining days during which the team will hold a 15 minute daily standup and 1/4 day for an Estimation/Story Meeting. While blocking out 1 whole day for Sprint Planning and 1 whole day for the Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective meetings is more than the Scrum Guide calls for, I have found that it is more realistic to working under the assumption that the team will get little else done on those days.

If the Sprint is 2 weeks long, we start with 10 working days. Once we block out the time mentioned above, we end up at 7.5 working days.

If we assume each person can be productive for a maximum of 6 hours per day, then:

6 hours/day * 7.5 days = 45

So, the absolute Maximum Possible Productive Hours (MPPH) for any individual in a two- week Sprint is 45 hours.

We then ask each person to total up the amount of time they expect to lose during the upcoming Sprint to the following events that are not part of the Scrum Framework:

Standing Meetings - recurring meetings held each week that will keep them from working on the project
Holiday/PTO - expected
Vacation/Sick time - expected or averaged
Medical/Dental/Other Personal Appointments - expected or averaged
Emergency Fixes* - average time lost per Sprint to emergencies which require them to temporarily abandon their work on the project
Misc. Additional Time - Any additional time they feel they should block out to address other issues, work or personal, which will inhibit their ability to contribute to the project during the Sprint

* Getting pulled away from a project to deal with emergencies that are not related to the project is a dysfunction that will impair the team's ability to realize the full benefits of Scrum. However, in several organizations I have worked with, it is a constant reality. When things break, and the money stops flowing, it's all hands on deck.

The total of the above is the Interruption Time (IT) that each team member must subtract from his or her MPPH. The amount of time left is the Revised Maximum Possible Productive Hours (RMPH).

If the individual is only working on a single project, then the RMPH is the amount of time that individual should feel comfortable sharing with their team members as their Committable Productive Time (CPT).

If the individual is split on multiple projects, then they should multiply the percentage of their time that is allocated to the project by the RMPH. They should then subtract an additional 10% from the result (for context switching) to get their Committable Productive Time (CPT).

Here is an example of the above...

Interruption Time:

4 hours standing meetings
8 hours PTO
3 hours for dentist appointment
5 hours average time lost to Emergency Fixes
5 hours subtracted because I will just be returning from overseas and I expect the jet lag to have a negative impact on my productivity for a few days

Interruption Time (IT) = 25 hours

45 (MPPH)

- 25 (IT)

20 (RMPH)

If I am split across 2 projects at 50% each...

20 (RMPH)

*50% allocation

10 hours

-10% (context switching)

9 hours of Committable Productive Time

In talking through this, it is very common to see jaws drop. However, if each person on the team is doing this, then the team will have a realistic understanding of its' work capacity in a given Sprint. While the idea of having to tell someone responsible for your performance review that in a two-week period that you can only be counted on for 9 hours of time may be scary, it is honest. If we are practicing Scrum and sticking with transparency (one of the 3 legs of Scrum), and we are being responsible to our fellow team members, this is the most responsible, transparent thing we can do.

Once each team member has shared their CPT, they are totaled up and this is the Team's Committable Productive Time (TCPT). As long as the total number of estimated ideal task hours does not exceed the TCPT, then the team should feel comfortable making a commitment to the Product Owner for the Stories they will complete during the Sprint. If the number of estimated ideal task hours does exceed the TCPT, then the team may have to negotiate with the Product Owner to reduce the work being planned for the Sprint before they make a commitment.

I have also seen teams break things down even further into number of hours for development, testing, etc., but what is above is typically as deep as I go with it.

It adds an extra step, but it helps the team members inspect and adapt their own workload and capacity. This will also better enable them to meet their commitment in a Sprint; IMHO, the benefits of this far exceed the few extra minutes it will take for a team to make sure they are not overcommitting.

Catching up... Podcastapalooza

2012-10-27T23:02:00.000-05:00

I'm ludicrously behind in keeping the blog up to date... working on that... here is a list of all the podcasts I've done for Projects At Work since The last posting about Mitch Lacey. There is a lot of great Agile stuff here...

Howard Sublett from BigVisible
Part 1 of 1

Martin Rosenqvist on Agile Transformation
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2

Tom Kealey on Getting Agile transformation to Stick
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2

Kenny Rubin on his new book Essential Scrum
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2

Dan Greening on Enterprise Scrum
Part 1 of 3
Part 2 of 3
Part 3 of 3

Interview with Mitch Lacey, author of The Scrum Field Guide

2012-05-24T11:25:00.002-05:00

Mitch Lacey

My Projects at Work podcast interview with Mitch Lacey, author of The Scrum Field Guide.

Also, check out my review of the book here.

2012-05-17T10:57:00.002-05:00

The Scrum Field Guide: Practical Advice For Your First Year
Written by Mitch Lacey, published by Addison-Wesley Professional as part of their Agile Software Development Series)

One of the things that is difficult about taking a Certified Scrum Master or Certified Product Owner classes is that to a large extent, the material looks at Scrum in a state that is (for many) based on an ideal they may never reach. Once students leave the class and go back to work, the number of obstacles they face in the struggle towards Agile transformation can be a daunting thing to overcome. If they are brave enough to take up the challenge, they soon bang up against the fact that when they try to apply Scrum in the wild, what they end up facing may not sync up so well with what was taught in class.

Enter Mitch Lacey’s new book: The Scrum Field Guide:Practical Advice For Your First Year. The Field Guide picks up where the classes leave off and addresses some of the real world issues that people face when they go back to their workplace and start trying to implement Scrum and Agile. In a narrative that is unassuming and easy to read, Mitch Lacey shares stories, his own experiences, and advice from other expert sources on how to actually get Scrum up and running and producing results. The book covers some of the most common questions that come up during implementation like:

When we don’t know what our velocity is, what do we tell our stakeholders we can commit to?

What if you have to play two roles at once?

How do you deal with team members that are only needed for brief, very specific types of work?

How is Scrum Master a full time job and how to you convince others of that?

The cases are presented through stories that set up the different situations. Lacey then draws on his own experiences leading and coaching Agile teams to explore the different options and offer his recommendations.

The book also includes a “First Aid” section for those who are trying to solve very specific issues with things like “Running a Productive Daily Standup Meeting” and dealing with some of the cultural challenges that are part of Agile Transformation.

While it is called the Scrum Field Guide, the book is not just about Scrum. Lacey introduces his own practice of Agile by saying that for him, one of the keys to getting Scrum to work has been pairing it with Extreme Programming. Throughout the book, Lacey introduces XP practices where he has seen them effectively utilized with Scrum.

While the book does include information on the actual Scrum Framework (in the Appendix) it is really designed to work best for folks who have a bit of experience in using Scrum and are seeing various issues, or “smells” as they are often called, creep up.

There are a lot of books out there that are aimed at clarifying what the Scrum Framework is. If you have clarity on what Scrum is supposed to be, and need a resource to help you make it work, The Scrum Field Guide will be a great addition to your tool belt. The title of the book indicates that this book is intended for people who are in their first year of doing Scrum. I’ve been working with Scrum for many years now and I’m also a Certified Scrum Trainer. I still found a lot of valuable information in this book and expect it is something I’ll be referencing in the future when I’m coaching.

Important Links:

Scrum Field Guide on Amazon

MitchLacey.com

@mglacey

2012-04-24T10:06:00.000-05:00

Projects@Work White Paper - Distributed Agile Teams: Achieving the Benefits

ProjectsatWork has published a study called Distributed Agile Teams: Achieving the Benefits. The report was put together by Elizabeth Harrin (@PM4Girls), who is the author of the website A Girls Guide to Project Management. The results of the research cover a lot of ground with respect to what makes distributed Agile projects work and what can contribute to their failure. The report is very insightful and definitely worth the time it takes to read. While some of the findings may seem like common sense, knowledge workers in the IT space (myself definitely included) seem to possess a remarkable capacity for periodic loss of grip to that tether.

My favorite part comes at the very end during the summary of recommendations. Number One on the list is:

Don’t act like your project is co-located – pay the tax for distribution.

This is one of the most simple things that so many of us forget when we are working at a distance. I believe this applies whether you are working down the hall from someone, or across the globe… there is a price that has to be paid when you are not sitting in the same room. With the transparency that Agile offers, this tax becomes far more obvious. There is no doubt that distributed teams provide a number of benefits, but those benefits come at a cost. The reason (IMHO) so many people struggle so much with distributed is that they keep thinking that the ride is free ... which it theoretically could be… unless you actually want it to work.

2012-04-24T09:48:00.001-05:00

Woefully behind in the blog (again)

Today is the day I am trying to get caught up on the blogging.

Here is a link to the ProjectsAtWork : Agile Coaches Corner interview I did recently with Xavier Quesada.

Part 2 of the Roman Pichler Interview (Podcast)

And my Projects At Work: Agile Coaches Corner interview with Ray Lewallen.
I've got lots of blogging to catch up on, there will be more posted very shortly.

2012-02-17T13:29:00.000-06:00

New Stuff Posted on Projects at Work

Part 1 (of 2) of my interview with Roman Pilcher is live -> http://www.projectsatwork.com/content/PodCasts/270538.cfm

Blog Post: How Much Do We Actually, Really, Totally Need To Do? -> http://www.projectsatwork.com/blog/Dave-Prior/5063/

2012-01-03T00:00:00.001-06:00

Questioning the "Cost of Sound"

I was listening to an interview on the radio today with one of the authors of a book called Healing at the Speed of Sound. The interview was intriguing enough that I’ve already started reading it, but what stuck with me the most from the interview was a question that was asked about the “cost of sound”. The idea being that any kind of noise around you, ambient noise from an air conditioner, the hum of electricity, water running though a pipe in the wall, children in another room or co-workers in a nearby cube, all have a cost associated with them. Since we can’t actually shut our ears, the way we can our eyes, we are always in listening mode. Even if you wear earplugs or noise cancelling headphones, you are merely swapping one noise for another. Noise is something we can’t entirely block out; our brain will always be processing the sounds around us. The reason that the “cost of sound” question stuck with me so much is because I started thinking about different work environments, how different types of people need different soundscapes to maintain productivity and yet, beyond making sure no one is disruptively loud, we pay little to no attention to sound when we put people together in a workspace.

So, what I’m wondering is, does anyone measure the impact of sound on productivity in an office setting. And, if anyone does, is there a way to translate the negative or positive actual cost (currency) impact of one sound scape over another on a given project? Can changes in sound scape be translated into cost or risk? And, is sound like other environmental conditions?

If the Hawthorne Works studies indicate that simply changing a variable in a work situation will result in increased productivity simply because of change, does this apply to sound? If I start playing Never Mind the Bollocks in the office, will folks be motivated to work more efficiently or quicker? Once their productivity has stabilized, if I replace the Sex Pistols with Kenny G, are they still going to see an improvement?

2011-09-23T11:07:00.000-05:00

#46(ish) Using Social Media. Two Years Later

2011-09-20T09:15:00.000-05:00

Points to Bas

Editing the new episode of Project Potion. Points to @projectshrink (Bas de Baar) for coming up with a reason to actually use Flipbook - to catch up on recent tweets into a specific hash tag.

The new episode includes a look back at how our use (as project leaders) of social media tools has evolved over the past 12-14 months. It should be up in a day or so.