Agile@Home. Sticky in the Kitchen.

23. März

My blog aims to be work-related. But using my time effectively is dear to me in my private life, just as well.

So let’s revisit Agile Backlog Management to make it work at home, most likely in your kitchen, as it often is the “command post” in a household.

If you’re new to Backlog Management, think about it as a way of focussing your time and resources on just a small number (ideally 1!) of tasks at a time that are currently the most important.

That also means that – for the moment – you don’t bother about all the other tasks.

All these tasks you manage in a list (a backlog).

If done with discipline,

you end up getting the important things done first,
you consistently create the best possible value for your customer, and
it allows you to correct your assumptions and priorities on your way forward, making sure you don’t pursue something that is no longer of value to your customer.

You can find a bit more on this in my very first post Getting started with a Backlog.

Let’s apply Backlog Management at home

I am a fan of Steve Denning’s book “The Manager’s Guide to Radical Management”. In an anecdote (I remember it loosely), Steve writes about a Danish (or Swedish) CEO of a successful Software Development company.

This CEO had just bought an old school house to live with his family. It needs to be renovated and many things need to be put in order immediately.

So, when he comes home at night his wife would ask him to “hang up that picture”, “fix the faucet in the lavatory”, “paint the garden table”, “fix the garage roof”, “provide the data to fill out the tax form”, “plant a tree”, “clean the outside patio”, “saw the old wood in the yard”, etc.

Now, to add some more drama: Later in the evening, if he was working on “fixing the faucet” she’d come around to tell him, that the sons’s “bike’s flat tire needs to be fixed”, as well, and “the bunny cage moved in another corner of the garden”.

Sounds familiar? No, not the stereotype husband-wife setup I used … :-), the many things that need be done, and while you’re at one, you’re being interrupted or distracted by other tasks.

You end up trying to get everything done somehow, some of it at the same time.

Sometimes you get stuck in all the pending tasks, juggling their priorities, and eventually you don’t get anything done anymore. Luckily for us here, this seems to happen in projects at work more often, than at home.

Stephen Denning refers to it as the “phantom traffic jam” when just simply too many cars are on the highway and at one point without a reason (i.e. an accident on the other side) traffic comes to a complete stop.

You’re stuck – and often will now invest your energy in a big re-priorization exercise…

Let’s make sure you don’t get stuck, then – and that you can make the best out of your time and resources.

Here’s a “tool” for us at home to prioritize our tasks.

A simple canvas that allows us to work with small sticky notes.

Basically you collect every necessary task, but you are only allowed to pick 3 of them to work on. Only once a task is completed can you move up a next one.

We’ve prototyped with big sticky notes first and then moved to smaller ones – and we left away what wasn’t helping.