• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What do I plan to accomplish today?
• What are my obstacles?

Starting this month, we also listed out our small goals striving towards our Epics. My May goals are:

Velocity – the measurement of the rate and direction in the position of an object.

- Wikipedia

We were talking a few days ago about how to deal with stress. The best way to deal with stress is to not get stressed in the first place.  Snarky answer, but it’s true.  I find one of my major stress factors is overcommitting. I’m a people-pleaser – it’s hard for me to say no, hard for me not to volunteer, hard to not come to the rescue.  And what ends up happening is that I drop commitments and disappoint, and thus more stress (to myself and the interested parties) than if I’d simply said “no” in the first place.

When we meet in the mornings and go over what we plan to do that day, I listen and try to catch if someone rolls off a long list of tasks.  One thing we have to remember in this process is that we’re committing to doing things we know we can accomplish.  Agile Self Development is all about creating small successes that we can build on each day to create large successes.  We’ll fail occasionally but we need to make sure we don’t fail because we’ve taken on too much.

One of the hardest things to do in agile software development is to figure out how much work the team can commit to for a sprint.  On one hand, estimating how much time a particular task will take to accomplish can be difficult if not impossible.  In addition, we can’t foresee what interruptions, flare-ups, or schedule conflicts we’re going to encounter as we work.  Trying to balance between undercommitting and overcommitting is a tricky art. Undercommit and we won’t meet our deadline and thus lose money. Overcommit and we run the risk of burnout and poor quality, both of which cost money.  The good news is that as the team works through a project, if they monitor how much they accomplish in each sprint, they start to know their velocity – how much work they can expect to complete in a given time period.

Fortunately, what we do in ASD doesn’t usually translate into lost revenue but it can result in stress. Again, the only way to know our velocity is to track what we’ve accomplished.  Each morning, I log what each member completed the day before and what they commit to for that day.  We haven’t taken the time to review yet and I’m very interested in doing so.  That’s the only way we’ll all get better at this and reduce that stress of overcommitment.

*A complete ripoff of Dave Eggers. Sorry, Dave.

It’s too big.

When we’re faced with a large project we can easily be overwhelmed. There’s too much to do, too much to think about, too much to worry about. When that happens the beautiful goal becomes the Sword of Damocles.

Combat this. Take the big project and break it into small, manageable projects. At my office, I coach my teams to break down projects into functionality that can be completed within a two week timebox, or sprint. There are two reasons to do this: 1) it forces the team to create smaller, acheivable goals and 2) it gives the team regular, repeatable “wins” – small successes upon which we can build.

“Fix the Buick” is what we call in software development an Epic User Story.  It’s large and fuzzy – there’s not enough detail to really get started.  It’s overwhelming. But consider:

1. Wash the car
2. Rebuild the carburetor
3. Replace the head gasket
4. Replace the points and plugs
5. Put on new tires
6. Drop the transmission and have it replaced/repaired (not sure I want to tackle that one)
7. Clean and refill the brake lines

If I can complete these seven small(ish) goals, I’m well on the way to cruising in my sweet ride.  I know I can do these small goals; they’re well defined and I’ve done most of them before.  I’ve turned a marathon into a series of sprints.

Now if the weather will just get warmer I can start…

In Scrum, the software development methodology, the team relies on the Scrum Master (yes, really) to coordinate the project, remove obstacles, buffer the team against distractions, and generally enforce the rules.  Something tells me that whoever came up with the term had played D&D at some point.

In ASD, the concept of the Scrum Master doesn’t really work.  Since each of us in the group are working on different goals and not on a single project, there’s no need to coordinate everyone’s actions.  Obstacles to personal goals usually have to be addressed by the individual or by an unrelated party.  The same applies to distractions; the group can give suggestions but it’s up to the individual to avoid them.  And finally, while there are guidelines and suggestions for ASD, there are no rules per se.  In fact, we’re pretty much making this up as we go along.  The only rule so far has been to get together each morning and run the three questions.  Well, that and the meeting doesn’t start until everyone has coffee.

So while I’ve kicked this thing off, I’m in no way the Scrum Master for ASDBhm. Each of us is responsible to ourselves and to our own goals and tasks each day. I’ll chivvy and coach, make suggestions and connections, and generally be there for support. But if you want to join, you have to commit to it. It won’t work if you don’t.

You are your own Scrum Master.

The first thing we do is get coffee.  Especially Andrea.

If you read the last post you know the three daily questions. If you haven’t read it – go do so.  I’ll wait.  If you’re just lazy, here they are again:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What do I plan to accomplish today?
• What are my obstacles?

All of us in the group have goals we’re striving toward.  This first week has been more about setting, defining, and refining those big goals and then figuring out how to break those big, amorphous, overwhelming goals into smaller goals that we can manage and achieve.

For instance, one of my large goals is the whybhm.com project (more on that here).  My initial, small goal is to get 6-8 interviews complete for the project.  The second goal after that is to launch the site with a full design and buildout.  I only had one (ONE!) done as of last week – thanks to Erin. Thus, my answer on Tuesday to the “What do I plan to accomplish today?” question was to contact people on my list for potential interviews for the project.  Guess what I did on Tuesday?

On Wednesday, I came to the meeting and reported that I had in fact scheduled six (SIX!) people to meet and at least talk about the project.  I’ve met with most of those now and accomplished a second interview (thanks Shaun!) with plans to get the others coming up this week. Progress!

Having these daily meetings accomplishes two things. It focuses each of us on those goals and tasks that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle and chaos of our day-to-day life. It also makes us accountable to the others in the group to report our progress each day. If you’re a well disciplined person you can probably make your to-do list and stick to it. The rest of us could use a little peer pressure.

I attended South by Southwest Interactive (sxsw) earlier this month and one of the first sessions I went to was Agile Self Development.  Turns out having this as one of my first sessions was quite useful.  If you’re in software development, you’ve probably heard of the various Agile software development methodologies (at least, I hope you have).  if you’re not, you can read about it here. The presenters, Dinah Sanders and Marcy Swenson, have taken the principles of Agile and applied them to personal goal setting and achievement (their blog is here and has a lot more info).  One of the first questions they asked us during the panel was “What are your goals for sxsw?”  I had to think about this.  I’d been running at top speed the weeks leading up to the conference and I’d barely even looked at the schedule much less tried to plan anything out.  After a minute, I raised my hand (yeah, I was the first one) and answered. I had two goals:

• Meet people. Not just any people, but people with whom I’d still be in contact after six months
• Become a better manager, employee, and person

Others in the crowd followed suit and a great discussion started. As a follow-up question, Dinah asked how we were going to make sure we accomplished out goals.  There were lots of suggestions but the one that really stuck with me was the idea of a daily scrum or stand up meeting. In a daily scrum, each person answers three questions:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What do I plan to accomplish today?
• What are my obstacles?

This daily status reinforces one’s focus towards the goal and enforces accountability for one’s actions. It’s an extraordinarily powerful and easy tactic for progress measurement.

A quick aside. Twitter was all the rage at sxsw. In fact, every panel had their own hashtag for questions and comments. The panel hashtag concept exploded into a complete communication backchannel where attendees expounded and argued on the points made by the presenters.

I can’t recall who initially suggested it, but the idea of a daily sxsw scrum popped up in the twitter feed for the ASD panel. I thought, what the hell, might as well, and volunteered to start one up. There were a couple of other folks that half-heartedly committed but one other guy actually did – Dave Prior. Dave is a PM from Oklahoma City and was a great partner for the dailies – he even let me cut in the Starbucks line! Dave and I met each morning of sxsw at 9 – yes, even those mornings after being out until 4 – and ran the three questions. The impact was immediate and direct. I seriously don’t think I would have met the people I did or had the experience I had without those meetings and without Dave holding me accountable.

The daily scrum was such a success for me at sxsw that as soon as I returned to Birmingham I decided to spin up a group here. So I put the call out on twitter and again got a few kinda-commits but three people have actually made it:

• Erin Shaw Street, writer/editor extraordinaire (and inaugural whybhm.com contributor!)
• Andrea Walker, all-powerful branding and marketing guru
• Jennifer Howell, brainiac of the UAB epilepsy research squad

Huge kudos to these three magnificent women. While none of us have made it to every day, at least some of us have. And that’s kept us honest.

Next up, what do we actually do at these meetings. I mean, besides drink a crapload of coffee.