Avatar photoSteven Savage

Steve’s Update 5/28

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

It’s my weekly Scrum style standup for the audience.  Which is you.

This week saw a lot of stuff with fanime, so let’s get to what’s up?

So what have I done the last week?

  • Way With Worlds Minibook #5:  As usual, writing.
  • Social: Fanime has gone great, seeing people, having fun.  And yes, I budgeted time for it – to make sure I relaxed.
  • Speaking: Spoke at Fanime, it went great!  Think the self-publishing panel needs to be broken up into several panels there’s so much to cover.
  • Cosplay: I was Doctor Oobleck, and it was a lot of fun!
  • Her Eternal Moonlight: The sale is on of course!  Which you probably saw in my announcements!
  • “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet:” Still a bit behind on this I’m afraid, mostly because I have to keep “extracting” myself from ideas I locked myself into during that failed first plotting.  Imagine it like building the foundation of a house and finding you still had some stones you laid while redesigning it.

What am I going to do this week:

  • Plan New Sprint for June: That gets done Wednesday or so.  Targets for June are releasing the first Minibook, speaking at Hydra-Con, finishing the “Bridge To The Quiet Planet” plot outline and writing the first chapter (again, hopefully).
  • Way With Worlds Minibook #5:  Well, uh . . . writing.  So as you guessed I’m doing a few bits each week or so.
  • “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet:” I’m going to at least get the character designs fully fleshed out and get the plot outline further along – at least to a few paragraphs if not a few pages.
  • Writing: I’m going to keep doing my Agile blog posts, but I think I’m going to start posting on my findings in writing – that experience of doing a major fiction project again is pretty informative.
  • Newsletter: A new newsletter comes out this Wednesday!  I also have to get all the new signups for my newsletter into the database!

Challenges and blockers:

  • Mostly challenges to do fiction writing again, I don’t quite have a sense of how long things take restored.  But hey live and learn.  This will improve in time – and I get to post my lessons.
  • There may be some challenges with training at work and some changes taking up time, so fair warning things might get delayed.

– Steve

My Agile Life: Agile Is A Dialogue

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

This is my continuing column on my “Agile Life” experiment where I use the Agile techniques in Scrum for a more productive, less-stressful life.   My latest insight to shareis how Agile and agile techniques like Scrum are about diaogue.

These dialogues may be with yourself, with one person, or with many people. But there’s always a dialogue to be had. Not surprising, it’s part of the Agile Manifesto.

Three of the four parts of the agile manifesto are about communication – among the team, with customers, and with the reality of change. You talk to each other, to your customer, and respond to reality.

I’ve had plenty of dialogues in my Agile Life practices;   I’m the Product Owner, the Scrum Master, and a Team Member – sometimes it helps to have a little sit-down with myself.  Here’s a few:

  • In my planning I’d look at my Backlog and my Projects and have to ask what delivers value.
  • I’d ask how to break down stories into deliverable value.
  • In breaking down my Stories into tasks I’d have to ask what the tasks were and how they’d complete a story.
  • In my daily reviews, I’d ask what’s next and think over what I had to do – and maybe coordinate with people on things like when I’d run an errand or who could help me with something.
  • My Cumulative Flow would help me realize how much work was in the air – and how much I was delivering, in case I was overworking myself.
  • As I took care of things, I’d get ideas for the next Sprint or ways to improve, and make sure I had revised my plans and improved my methods.

Scrum, the Agile method I’m most experienced in, actually sets up tons of “dialogue moments in the form of ceremonies:

  • A planning session.
  • Daily standups.
  • Retrospectives.

So when you’re trying to be more Agile, to use Scrum or whatever, remember the need for dialogue – even with yourself. Asking good questions means getting good answers and doing good works. Even if it’s just you sitting there asking what’s the best way to cook for a party.
– Steve

My Agile Life: Failure

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

I’m talking my “Agile Life” experiment where I use the Agile techniques in Scrum in my everyday life.  Well, it doesn’t always work, so let’s talk failure – specifically something that went bad this Sprint of May.

As you know one of my goals for the May Sprint was to plot a new novel and write chapter 1. That has partially failed – which is a great time to examine what I did wrong and talk failure.

Agile methods are all about learning as opposed to shame.  We all make mistakes, we all have discoveries of what we didn’t know, so the goal is to learn and adapt.

So first, let’s see what happened:

  • I was going to start a new novel, “A Bridge To The Quiet Planet,” an SF/Fantasy mix.
  • I was going to use a lot of the techniques I’d used before to write it – heavy setting detail, iterative plotting. Just on a larger scale.
  • I found things not feeling “right.” The plot was stale, parts came and went, I didn’t feel I had a grasp on the story – I had about 60% of it but something felt off.
  • After analysis I realized I didn’t have a good a grasp as I thought, it wasn’t quite “alive.” There were good parts – there were *great* parts. But it felt half-made.

So now the questions come in – “Why.”

There’s a great technique called “The Five Whys” that I learned – basically to solve a problem, ask why – and when you get an answer, ask why again. Soon you’ll get to the cause, part of the cause, or one of the causes.

  • WHY did it feel wrong? Because it was. It was patchwork.
  • WHY did it feel patchwork? Because some parts were far more fleshed-out than others and they conflicted due to that.
  • WHY are they half fleshed-out? Because my designing was erratic.
  • WHY was my designing erratic? Because I dived in and didn’t think of what I needed to do as a specific set of tasks.
  • WHY did I do that? Because I didn’t think I’d need it, I’d just dive in as I’ve done this before.

I came to realize I got a bit arrogant. I’ve written and built worlds for 40 years. I’ve published books. I should be able to dive into this right because I’ve done so many similar things?

Yep, I should – if I had thought ahead. But I didn’t think about what was needed, didn’t look at my techniques, didn’t break down the work. If this had been a programming project, it’d be the Product Owner and an Engineer saying “hey, we know how to do this easy, so let’s just block out some time” without the Scrum Master saying “why do you think this doesn’t need the usual level of analysis?”

What I should have done is use all my techniques and experience to design a better plan – how long it’d take for this tasks, what tasks were needed, and so on.  It would have made me think, made me more aware of the work needed, and how that work tied together.

Lesson learned – in writing, like anything else, a good work breakdown is needed.  Just because you might be able to do it “from the gut” is no reason not to think it over – especially when you’re getting back in the swing of things.  Had this not been a novel but a shorter work I might not have caught this mistake.

Now of course after finding this the goal is to get back on track. How am I doing that?

  1. I will focus this month on plotting – any time meant for Chapter 1 now moves to plotting.  That helps me get a timeframe.  It’s still adding work to my sprint, so I may move out other plans – since getting this done is important, and spreading it out too much may mean it loses coherence.
  2. Writing is moving out by one month at least – maybe two.  But I’ll try to do Chapter One next month and then slowly ramp up.
  3. To plot the book I am breaking it down into tasks required to get a full plot outline that I can write from.  It’s really more of a product design process or a research task.  I may write up more on that depending how it goes.

The story quality is already looking much better, and I learned something about my own creativity. Also the story may have a slightly off kilter Technomancer riding a motorcycle on top of a moving train, so there’s that.

A good lesson on many grounds.

– Steve