Breaking down your work

Unsure why breaking down your work is so important? Ever heard of the penny game?

The penny game would be great for any type of agile workshop. Your team members will need to sit around table with 10 pennies. 

In round 1, the first person flips all 10 pennies, the next person along does nothing until the first person has finished. The work then get handed off to person 2. No one starts work until the person before them have finished.

Round 2 and 3 focus on breaking the work down further into smaller batches. Each time, the first batch is delivered to the customer quicker (providing value and feedback) and the whole task is completed quicker too.

This activity really shows the value of breaking down your user stories into small chunks. Each story needs to provide some value to the customer but breaking these items down into smaller chunks essentially means that the customer can not only get value early but also provide extremely useful feedback whilst the team continues to build out the feature. The early you can hear "That is exactly what we were hoping for, but can you make these few tweaks", the better :)

Visualising your flow of work

 Visualising your flow of work

I think often a lot of pressure is put on the quantity of work that a team should do (usually in a particular timeframe) but less on how quickly the individual pieces of work flow through the pipeline. The interesting thing is, the quicker the work flows through the pipeline, the earlier the customer gets visibility (providing value to the customer and also a great way of getting early feedback). 

Why is it useful to visualise your flow?

Visualising your flow can help identify and eliminate bottlenecks earlier. Any item that gets stuck mid flow (blocked) is waste. Moving items through the pipeline efficiency ensures maximum value to the customer and ensures early feedback on new features.

Put it this way, there is no point having a tester waiting for work, a PR sitting in review and 2 devs completing new (related or unrelated) items. 

Similarly there is no point in a developer picking up a new piece of work if the team already has a large amount of active items which are in progress (or blocked). Rather than picking up new items, a member of the team should consider pairing with another team member or helping unblock a blocker on a story.

WIP limits can be useful to help ensure that work flows through the system as it will force the team to eliminate bottlenecks by deterring them from picking up another item for example. The team has to essentially pull together the remove blockers and remove bottlenecks when there is too much work on the board.

Walking the board during stand ups can be a great way to visualising (and monitoring) your pipeline and identifying any issue with the flow of work before they become a big problem.

2021 goal: Read, learn, grow

2021 goal: Read, learn grow 

I have never been much of a big reader. You always hear that most successful business people read a lot of books. I knew I was missing a trick but I couldn't just never make reading a habit. I would pick up a book, read a few chapters and just lose interest. 

Last year, I picked up a book and challenged myself to read the whole thing, no matter how long it took, and how many times I got distracted, I was determined to get from front to back. 

It was the satisfaction of finishing that book, which drove me to (the next day) pick up my next. It wasn't just the personal satisfaction that made me eager to read more, it was also the ideas that popped into my head whilst reading. It made me question my way of working and think up improvement ideas. It was relatable to the way I worked and extremely valuable in terms of thinking how I/the team could do better.

With this new thirst for reading (and a keen mindset to keep it up) I set myself a goal for 2021 to read at least 10 books. If reading 1 book had helped me, what could 10 do!! 

I still wouldn't say that reading for me has become a "habit". I still sometimes have to convince myself to get through "at least one chapter" especially on a busy week... but... the improvement of how much I have learnt from last year to this year is immense. We're just under 4 months in, I am on my 5th book and completed 1 audio book. I've even selected my next few books and my list seems to be growing quicker than it is shrinking.