My Personal Agile: Introduction

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

All right people, money where my mouth is time.  I’ve been talking to several friends and my girlfriend about my use of Agile methods (Scrum specifically) at home.  They’re curious, but they noted it’d be easier if I wrote this up.  Realizing I’m a writer I felt kind of dumb because, you know . . . I should have thought of it.

So guess what you’re going to see for the next few weeks?  That’s right – a detailed (but light) guide to my own Personal Agile system readable by normal humans.

Now let’s talk Agile, but first . . .

If You’ve Used Agile:

Don’t worry this isn’t fanatic or preachy stuff.  I come from an engineering and science background, bits and bytes and blood and guts.  I’m interested in results.

However I am big on learning and making good productivity part of everyday behavior.  That might get annoying.

You can probably skip the next section.

If You Haven’t Used Agile:

So what’s this Agile stuff?  Let’s go to a basic outline that is hopelessly minimizing everything but still useful.

  1. Formally or informally a lot of management and productivity has been top-town – orders, schedules, hierarchy, etc.  You get the idea – build a plan and follow it.  These days this is often called “Waterfall” but the basic idea’s been around for most of human history, and “Waterfall” as a concept is a comparatively recent invention.
  2. For a few decades at least (and informally throughout human history) people also have known this whole plan-it-then-try-it method doesn’t work.  Methods of alternate management and workflow have been developed.  Many are older than people realize, but were in specialized markets.  Look up the history of Kanban sometime.
  3. Software really seems to have blown the lid off of a need to find new ways to organize.  Software jacks all the problems of doing any task up to 11: it’s fast, it’s variable, it’s evolving.  A lot of methods to make software management and productivity work better evolved, and people started calling these collectively “Agile.”
  4. In 2001 a whole bunch of Agile people met at a resort to discuss this and produced the Agile Manifesto and the 12 principles, which are seriously worth reading.  This really consolidated and kicked off Agile practices – Agile had a Philosophy, and there was feedback between Philosophy and Methods.
  5. Since this time, people have been adapting various forms of Agile all over.

So that’s it.  People knew traditional management didn’t always work, software really revealed that and drove people to fix it, and from that emerged a more coherent philosophy that sent things into overdrive.

EXERCISE: Go to the Agile Manifesto and read it.  How do you apply (even if accidentally) the four core elements of it?

EXERCISE 2: Read the 12 Agile Principles.  Which make sense to you and which don’t.  Why?

Why Is Agile Different From Other Methods?

(Hey those of you who have used Agile?  You can keep reading now).

Here’s how I see Agile differing from other methods of getting organized that aren’t, well, Agile?

  1. Agile focuses near-obsessively on value and why you’re doing something.  As you may guess, Agile also helps you realize when something is stupid.
  2. Agile focuses on adaptability and responding to – even embracing – change.  This helps you get the most out of change, even when unwelcome.
  3. Agile is heavy on feedback and adjustment and review.  Improvement is baked in.
  4. Agile is about everyone involved practicing it.  This is why I think the Agile Manifesto is so important, it was a basis for people not just doing Agile but becoming Agile.

Cool, So What’s This Scrum Thing?

Scrum is one of the Agile Methodologies or Practices (I see people use the terms interchangeably).  It was my first encounter with Agile, and frankly I consider it and the older practice of Kanban (which I use parts of) to be the best stuff I’ve seen.  Yes, I’m biased.

At a high level, Scrum works like this:

  1. You keep a list of things you want to do in priority order.  That’s the Backlog.
  2. You set aside a block of time to do work, called a sprint.  This is often two weeks in software, but I use a month for myself since my life has a monthly cadence.
  3. Every sprint you look at your Backlog and take all the things you can do from the top down.  You do not skip an item unless it turns out something is more important.  Basically you take the most important things that you can do in that timeframe – that becomes your Sprint Backlog.
  4. You do the work and adjust and adapt.  Sometimes you find that there are issues, sometimes you find old work.  Sometimes you even find you have more time and grab more to do – off the top of the backlog.
  5. At the end of the sprint you figure out how you did, look over the backlog, and do it all again.

Scrum hits a sweet spot of “free-form” and “organized” for many.  You can predict work done more or less.  You know priorities.  If anything goes wrong you review every sprint and can navigate.  You also know what’s expected of you (or from yourself) in a timeframe.

You can probably see how this helps out.  When I implemented my own Personal Agile, which is mostly Scrum, I actually got everything done within the first 3/4 of the month.  I had a gain of 25% productivity – and I was already pretty productive using the Agile-sih “Getting Things Done” method (which is well worth reading up on).

EXERCISE: If you were more efficient – without overloading yourself – how much more do you think you’d get done?  Can you put a percent of gain you think you’d experience.

So What’s Coming Up?

Fine, you got the backstory.  Let’s get to the methods – next up we talk why things matter.

– Steve