A Big Goal Is Not The Same As Vision

I am taking a day off from our re-read of Thinking, Fast and Slow to spend the day at a pickle festival.  I began the morning with a bike ride (Mr. Adam’s has already commented on Strava) rather than running to change things up just a little which helped shift me to an introspective mood!  For your reading pleasure, a slightly modified entry from the Motivational Sunday series, this one from a Sunday in December 2013.

While we have a little less than half of a year left before the approaching New Year we can still take time to consider the goals and objectives we created for the year or New Year’s resolutions made.  However, many times we set goals that do not support our vision.  Goals are steps along a path, while the vision is the destination.  If we were to write our goals in a user story format, the goal would the action and the vision or strategy the benefit. When goals and vision are not linked, it will be hard to achieve either.

 

Habit and Commitment

Rewards Needed?

The Software Process and Measurement Cast and Blog crew is on the road this weekend so we are going to take a day off from our re-read of Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou (published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 – Buy a copy and read along!)   Today we re-visit a blog entry from 2013,  In 2013 we ran a series titled “Motivational Sunday”.  In this entry, we talked about the relationship between commitment and habits. I have tweaked the works a little but the sentiments are no different. Commitment and habits can be positively interrelated. Commitment is being dedicated to a cause or activity.  Habits reflect a more or less fixed routine. The combination of commitment and habit is beneficial if the commitment is to a positive goal and habit does not become an obsession. Once it is established, the combination can go into autopilot. In my world, running reflects a positive combination of commitment and habit.

 

Getting Stuff Done: Scrumban and Beginning With A Backlog

Longer races usually use “bins” to group runners, like classes of service.

Without some sort of structure, projects, daily to-dos, ideas and just flat stuff can quickly overwhelm anyone. Many, if not most, of us have spent time taking time management classes of all types in an attempt to find the secret sauce for managing the chaos that is the 21^st century. My wife is a sort of adherent of GTD®. Once upon a time I took classes for the Franklin Covey Planner, and I dutifully carried it everywhere. In recent years I have used Scrum and Kanban to manage projects. Many of the lessons in Agile and lean project management coupled with time management concepts are a useful synthesis: a personal Scrumban (Kanban-y Scrumban) approach. The approach begins with deciding on a set of classes of service and then developing an initial backlog.

 

15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management: A Quick Review and Recommendation

Time is a resource that everybody struggles to manage. Kevin Kruse’s new book, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management, outlines a set of tools that he has extracted from interviews with highly successful entrepreneurs, academics, and students. The 15 secrets include recognizing that there are only 1,440 minutes a day (be careful of those that ask you if you have a minute), identifying and focusing on your single most important task, and abandoning your to-do lists for a calendar. None of these or the other 12 secrets is easy to adopt if you are not already practicing time management techniques. While these techniques are not easy, you can unlearn less effective techniques based on purported common knowledge.

I have already been able to adopt a number of the practices, much to the chagrin of colleagues that don’t want an agenda that begins with the highest value item rather than something easy.

The book lays out the 15 secrets and then shares outtakes from Kevin’s conversations with students, entrepreneurs and academics. Frankly, I got little from the interviews with the academics and wish there were fewer. I got the most from the students (this section, I felt, ran a bit long also, but when I looked at all that I had highlighted, I recognized that my feeling was probably wrong).

Overall, I believe this book is extremely useful to me, even though I am old hand at time management. Regardless of whether you think you are a time management pro or are just starting to deal with trying to manage your own time, 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management will be a valuable tool for helping you to manage your time successfully.

Buy Kevin’s book in paper or  Kindle eBook format!

Next week the vacation is over and we will get back to the Mythical-Man Month!

 

Getting Stuff Done: Weekly Retrospectives

A sailboat can be used as a metaphor in a retrospective.

Most Agile and lean frameworks are built on the idea what is accomplished can be verified by observation or experience. For example, working software is the proof for software development, enhancement or maintenance, rather than a status report or an updated project schedule. The software can be demonstrated, which connects the act of doing with actually delivering value, partially completing the loop in an empirical process. Retrospectives provide a path to incorporate what was learned while working into the next wave of planning and executing. While daily retrospectives provide a very tactical mechanism to ensure that that the right tasks are tackled on a daily basis, a less frequent and more in-depth mechanism is needed to identify and address broader and more strategic issues. Personal Scurmban leverages a weekly retrospective that bookends the weekly cycle that is started by the weekly planning process.

 

Getting Stuff Done: Daily Retrospectives

Reflection is a central tenant of all Agile frameworks. Do a bit of planning, execute against that plan, then step back and reflect on what was done and how it can be done better. Reflection acts as both a capstone for a period of work and as an input into the next cycle. For example, in Scrum each sprint culminates with the team performing a retrospective so they can learn and improve. Retrospectives have the same power whether they are team based or done at a personal level. In personal Scrumban, performing a daily retrospective is useful to generating focus and then tuning that focus based on the day-to-day pressures and changes in direction.

Daily retrospectives are a quick reflection on the days activities and how they were performed. The goal of the daily retrospectives is continuous improvement at a very intimate level, focused on the day YOU just completed. The process can be a simple extension of classic listing retrospective techniques (answering the questions “what worked well” and “what did not work,” and then deciding on what can be done better). A second process for daily retrospectives that I often recommend (and the one I use) is to:

1. Position yourself in front of your Scrumban board. Personal Scrumban boards come in many shapes and sizes, ranging from white boards marked with columns for backlog, doing and done with a few yellow sticky-notes to fairly sophisticated tools like Trello or LeanKit Kanban.
2. Adjust any cards (or tasks) to ensure that the current state of progress is reflected. This step will ensure you have re-grounded yourself based on what was accomplished during the day and made sure the board is ready for the daily planning/stand-up session the next day (kill as many birds with one stone as possible).
3. Reflect on what you accomplished during the day. Celebrate the successes, then ask yourself whether you learned anything from what you accomplished that could be generalized and leveraged in future tasks. Alternately, ask yourself what was one new thing you learned today. Make a list and watch it grow. These techniques support process improvement, but are also motivational.
4. Reflect on what you committed to accomplish during the day and did not complete (if anything). The goal is not to re-plan at this point, but to determine what got in the way and what can be learned from the experience. Pick one of issues you identified that you will commit to working on fixing (and are within your ability to address) and add it to your backlog. Consider for performing more of a formal root cause analysis (Five Whys for example) for the items that continually find their way on list.
5. Close your notebook or turn off you laptop and call it a day!

The process for daily retrospectives is fairly simple. I try to spend 15 minutes at the end of work every day performing a retrospective. More than once I have tempted to spend more than 15 minutes on the process, however when I do, I find that what I’m really doing is planning for the next day. If I have found a shortcoming to the daily retrospective it is that I try to perform the process as the last event of the day (hence step 5), which makes it easy to forget if I am tired or the day has extended into the wee hours of the morning. Frankly, those are exactly the days that a daily retrospective is needed the most.

Daily retrospectives provide a tool to make changes when they can have the most effect. By their nature, daily retrospectives are more focused than weekly- or team- or sprint-level retrospectives, but that focus makes them very valuable for affecting the day-to-day process of how your work is done. Adding daily retrospective to your personal Scrumban adds the power of an empirical process to your daily grind.

 

Getting Stuff Done: Planning

 

A framework is just a framework without planning!

Personal Scrumban establishes a framework for conquering the chaos that day-to-day life can throw at you. However having a structure, even a structure with multiple classes of service, does not get the most important pieces of work in the queue when they need to be in the queue. Planning is required. Weekly and daily planning exercises, similar to sprint planning and the daily stand-up, are useful for taming the backlog and adapting to the demands of real life.

I begin all weekly planning sessions with a quick backlog grooming session (note: when new items are added to the queue during the week, grooming can be performed). In personal Scrumban, the goal of backlog grooming is not get team consensus (no need for the Three Amigos). Rather the goal is to ensure each backlog item that might need to be tackled in the next week has been broken down so that there are one or two immediate next steps identified. The first step in backlog grooming is to ensure that all work items (or stories) have been classified by class of service. For example, if one of the work items was “Review cover art for the Hand-Drawn Slide Saturday Ebook,” the work item should be classified in the Podcast/Blog class of service. Classes of service act as a macro prioritization and assigns the work to the relevant time slice in any given day. The second step is sizing, just like in Scrum, the immediate next steps should be of a size that can be accomplished in a single sitting. The information gathered in execution will used as part of daily planning or during the next weekly planning session.

Weekly planning is comprised of getting work items in priority order and then deciding which needs to be dealt with during the upcoming week GIVEN what is known when planning occurs. If you have not already established a work-in-process limit (WIP), set one for each class of service. A WIP limit is the amount of work you will allow yourself to start and actively work on at any point. Work is only started if there is capacity to complete the task. Prioritize up to the WIP limit or just slightly past the limit in each category. Remember if as you complete tasks in a category (and you have time) you can refresh the backlog by prioritizing new items. I generally do my weekly planning every Sunday evening so that I am ready to begin the when I roll out of bed on Monday.

Daily planning is exactly like a daily stand-up meeting, with two minor twists. In Scrum, the daily stand-up meeting starts the day with each team member answering the three famous questions:

• What did I complete since the last meeting?
• What will I complete before the next meeting? and
• What is blocking progress?

The three questions provide a framework to make generate laser focus on what is done and what needs to be done. The twists

In personal Scrumban, as in normal Kanban, completed work items would have been moved to the completed column of the Kanban board as soon as they done, however this is a good time to ensure that has occurred. The twists relate to how new items are dealt with and time allocation. During planning, work items that will be accomplished during the next 24 hours should be moved to in-progress. Given the nature of daily planning, if new work items have been discovered and prioritized into the backlog, they then become part of the standard planning process. The stand-up also provides time to reflect on anything that will block accomplishing the planned work items. A second twist to the stand-up process is a reassessment of the time slices being provided to each class of work. For example, if a critical work product needs to be completed, time from a more discretionary class of service can be reallocated and the work items in this category can be put on hold.

A weekly planning session provides a stage to address the week. To paraphrase Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, no weekly plan stands first contact with Monday. The daily stand-up provides a platform to re-adjust to the nuances of the week so that you can stay focused on delivering the maximum value possible. Without planning, all personal Kanban is a framework and a backlog of to-do items.  Planning puts the energy into the framework that provides the guidance and reduces stress.

 

Getting Stuff Done: Scrumban and Beginning With A Backlog

Longer races usually use “bins” to group runners, like classes of service.

Without some sort of structure, projects, daily to-dos, ideas and just flat stuff can quickly overwhelm anyone. Many, if not most, of us have spent time taking time management classes of all types in an attempt to find the secret sauce for managing the chaos that is the 21^st century. My wife is a sort of adherent of GTD®. Once upon a time I took classes for the Franklin Covey Planner, and I dutifully carried it everywhere. In recent years I have used Scrum and Kanban to manage projects. Many of the lessons in Agile and lean project management coupled with time management concepts are a useful synthesis: a personal Scrumban (Kanban-y Scrumban) approach. The approach begins with deciding on a set of classes of service and then developing an initial backlog.

In a typical implementation of Kanban, classes of service allow teams to break backlog items into different groups either based on risk or the cost of delay. In our personal Scrumban, we combine the concept of cost of delay with different focus areas. Unlike a typical work environment where a person and team would focus on one thing at a time, a personal process for handling the overwhelming list of projects and tasks that occur in everyday life needs to acknowledge life is more than a project or a sprint.

I have developed an approach that recognizes five classes of work ranging from association work items to work items associated with my work (I am process consultant and manager at the David Consulting Group). Each class of service has a higher or lower priority based on the day of the week and time of day.

My Classes of Service

For example, daily items like running or editing a podcast segment typically have higher priority between the time I get up and beginning the work day. In a similar manner house/personal and podcast/blog entries priorities are driven by day of week and/or time of day. Alternately work and association items are driven by cost of delay. The backlog items in each class of service vie for the slices of attention available 24 hours a day and seven days a week.

Backlog items are captured in a wide variety of manners. For example, project work items can be captured using standard techniques for building an initial backlog (observation, showing, asking and/or synthesis). Backlogs for most projects can be developed using these techniques. Many smaller items or grand concepts will be discovered while encountering day-to-day trails and just generally living life. These need to be captured and logged (a habit that has been drilled into me by my wife), where they can be broken down and prioritized at leisure rather than being forgotten. Just as in a typical backlog, items that that are higher priority (by class of service) are broken down into next steps that are small enough to be completed in one to two days.

Using Scrumban as an approach to bring order out of chaos can be combined with other time management techniques. Real life is more complicated than a single project. For example, real life might be a project at work, prepping the yard for winter on the weekend, training for a half marathon and writing a book before sunrise. Each type of work is its own class of service that needs to be addressed separately to focus on what is important, when it is important.

 

A Simple Tool: A pep talk

It takes a good attitude to be a good leader.

As a leader of people is easy to become weary to your bones after trying to convince a reticent organization, team or person to become a butterfly, when all they want to do is to stay in their nice safe cocoon. The forces lined up against you can be daunting. Don’t work against yourself by making your attitude part of the problem. Your attitude is one of your primary tools to lend credibility to your message and convince people to engage and befriend you. There are three attributes you need to consider managing immediately: negativism, sarcasm and partisanship.

Negativism is a habitual attitude of skepticism or resistance to the suggestions, order or instructions of others. This includes change and the belief that change is warranted or even possible. Leading change requires that you believe that you can succeed to motivate yourselves and those you are trying to influence. Without a belief that you can succeed, it will be difficult to get up in the morning and impossible to motivate others. I must at admit that I sometimes find that it is easy to confuse being highly rational with negativism. In the wee hours of the night make sure you evaluate which side of the line you are on and make corrections if you have strayed.

Behavior such as sarcasm might be acceptable amongst friends, but the impact of sarcasm is even less predictable when people do not know you or might have a different cultural filter are involved in the conversation. How many time have you heard “hey can’t they take a joke?” The answer is maybe not if it is apparently funny to their point of view. Frankly, just dropping sarcasm from your portfolio of communication techniques might be the best idea.

Another critical mistake that can be traced back to attitude is a need to have an enemy to strike against. Creating a “we/they” environment creates barriers between groups will make finding common ground more difficult. There are rarely benefits when one side is forced to capitulate to another (it difficult to compromise with someone you view as the enemy). You must recognize that as a leader and a negotiator your goal is to find the best solution for your organization.

Negativism, sarcasm and partisanship will minimize your effectiveness as a leader in the long run, and will add to the burden you need to shoulder in order to make change happen. Leading change is not an easy job. Don’t make it harder than it needs to be. Your attitude can either a simple powerful tool or concrete block to tow behind you.

 

Words Have Power

Remember that the race does not always go to the just; however not running will ensure that you can’t win. Don’t let your words keep you from running the race.

Words have power,when used correctly — the power to sell ideas, to rally the troops and to provide motivation. Or words can be a tactic signal of resistance to change and an abrogation of responsibility.  In the later set of scenarios, perfectly good words go bad.  I want to highlight three words, which when used to declare that action won’t be taken or as a tool to deny responsibility for taking action, might as well be swear words.  The words, in my opinion, that are the worst offenders are ‘but’, ‘can’t’ and ‘however’.  The use of any of these three words should send up a red flag that a course is being charted to a special process improvement hell for an organization.

‘But’

The ugliest word in the process improvement world, at least in the English language, is ‘but’ (not but with two t’s).  ‘But’ is a fairly innocuous word, so why do I relegate it to such an august spot on my bad words list?  Because the term is usually used to explain why the speaker (even though they know better) can’t or won’t fight for what is right.  As an example, I recently participated in a discussion about involving the business as an equal partner in a project (a fairly typical discussion for an organization that is transitioning to Agile).  Everyone involved thought that the concept was important, made sense and would help the IT department deliver more value to the organization, ‘but’ in their opinion, the business would not be interested in participating.  Not that anyone would actually discuss having the business be involved with them or invite them to the project party.  A quick probe exposed excuses like “but they do not have time, so we won’t ask” and the infamous, “but that isn’t how we do it here.”  All of the reasons why they would not participate were rationalizations, intellectual smoke screens, for not taking the more difficult steps of asking the business to participate in the process of delivering projects.  It was too frightening to ask and risk rejection, or worse yet acceptance, then have to cede informational power through knowledge sharing.  The use of the word ‘but’ is used to negate anything out of ordinary which gives the speaker permission to not get involved in rectifying the problem.  By not working to fix the problem, the consequences belong to someone else.

‘Can’t’

A related negation word is ‘can’t’. ‘Can’t’ is generally a more personal negation word than ‘but.’ Examples of usage include ‘I can’t’ or ‘we can’t’. Generally this bad word is used to explain why someone or some group lacks specific power to take action.  Again like ‘but’, ‘can’t’ is used to negate what the person using the word admits is a good idea.  The use of the term reflects an abrogation of responsibility and shifts the responsibility elsewhere. For example, I was discussing daily standups with a colleague recently.  He told me a story about a team that had stopped doing daily stand-up meetings because the product owner deemed them overhead.  He quoted the Scrum Master as saying, “It is not my fault that we can’t do stand-ups because our product owner doesn’t think meetings are valuable.” In short he is saying, “It isn’t my fault that the team is not in control of how the work is being done.”  The abrogation of responsibility for the consequences of the team’s actions is what makes ‘can’t’ into a bad word in this example.  ‘Can’t’ reinforces the head-trash which steals power from the practitioner that makes it easy to walk away from the struggle to change rather than looking for a way to embrace change.  When you empower someone else to manage your behavior, you are reinforcing your lack of power and reducing your motivation and the motivation of those around you.

‘However’

The third of this unholy trinity of negation words is ‘however’.  The struggle I have with this word is that it can be used insidiously to reflect a false use of logic to cut off debate.  A number of years ago, while reviewing an organization that decided to use Scrum and two-week iterations for projects, I was told, “we started involving the team in planning what was going to be done during the iterations, however they were not getting the work done fast enough, so we decided to tell them what they needed to do each iteration.”  The use of ‘however’ suggests a cause-and-effect relationship that may or may not be true and tends to deflect discussion from the root cause of the problem. The conversation went on for some period of time during which we came to the conclusion that by telling them what to do, the project had actually fared even worse.  What occurred was that the responsibility had been shifted away from poor portfolio planning onto the team’s shoulders.

In past essays I have discussed that our choices sometimes rob us of positional power.  The rationalization of those individual choices acts as an intellectual smokescreen to make us feel better about our lack of power. Rationalization provides a platform to keep a clinical distance from the problem. Rationalization can be a tool to avoid the passion and energy needed to generate change.

All of these unholy words can be used for good, and that it might be useful to have more instructions on how to recognize when they are be used in a bad way. A sort of a field guide to avoid mistaken recognition.  One easy mechanism for recognizing a poor use of ‘but’, ‘can’t’ and ‘however’ is to break the sentence or statement into three parts, everything before the unholy word, the unholy word and then everything after the unholy word.  By looking at the phrase that follows our unholy word all is exposed.  If the phrase rejects or explains why original and perfectly reasonable premise is bat poop crazy, then you have a problem.  I decided to spend some of my ample time in airports collecting observations of some of the negation phrases people use.  Some of shareable the examples I heard included:

1. I told you so.
2. It is not my fault.
3. Just forget it.
4. We tried that before.
5. That will take too long.
6. It doesn’t matter (passive aggressive).
7. We don’t do it that way.
8. My manager won’t go for it.

There were others that I heard that can’t be shared, and I am sure there are many other phrases that can be used to lull the listener into thinking that the speaker agrees and then pulls the rug out from the listener.

The use of negation words can be a sign that you are trying to absolve yourself from the risk of action.  I would like to suggest we ban the use of these three process improvement swear words and substitute enabling phrases such as “and while it might be difficult, here is what I am going to do about it.”  Our goal should be to act on problems that are blockers and issues rather than to ignore them or by doing that establishing  their reality by saying grace over them.  In my opinion, acting and failing is a far better course of action than doing nothing at all and putting your head in the sand.  The responsibility to act does not go away but rather affixes more firmly to those who do nothing than to those that are trying to change the world!  When you pretend to not have power you become a victim.  Victims continually cede their personal and positional power to those around them.  Remember that the race does not always go to the just; however not running will ensure that you can’t win. Don’t let your words keep you from running the race.