productivity

Agile Creativity – Principle #4: Daily Collaboration

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

Now the fourth Principle of Agile Software, which we’ll be re-purposing for creative work, is simple until you think about it for two seconds. It states.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Easy, right? First, let’s tweak this a bit for creatives

Customers and creatives must work together daily throughout the project.

Still simple, but I’m pretty sure you’ve been in situations where you couldn’t get someone to talk. Or respond to email. You probably wondered if they were OK. Maybe the Fourth principle is harder than it looks . .

At the same time, despite your disbelief, you probably see the value in this. If you and whoever you’re doing work for are in communication, you work better, get feedback better, and so on. Work becomes easier, faster, and friendlier.

It’s just that this sounds like it’d be real hard to implement.

So let’s break this Principle down – and focus on how you make it work – to everyone’s benefit.

Customers And Creatives Must Work Together . . .

This is a bit of a “duh” rule. But pause for a second and ask yourself what working together with the customer *really* means.

This Principle doesn’t say one is in charge and the other isn’t. It’s not about following a plan or not doing it. It’s the idea that you and your customer work together. You’re a team, even if one of you sort of started all of this and is probably paying the bills.

So you want to make sure you and whoever you’re doing creative work for are actually cooperating together to get a result and thinking of yourselves as working together. This is a bit of a radical mindshift (probably for both of you) and you can help encourage it because, well, you’re reading this. Approach working with your creative customers as a team effort, which means:

  • Encourage cooperation (of course).
  • Treat work as succeeding (and failing) together.
  • Develop a team approach, think of yourself as a team, cultivate that.
  • Include customers (when appropriate) in activities, from status reports to team lunches.

By the way, this may have you askin “hey, who is my customer.” We’ll get to that, but let’s finish off looking at the Foruth principle.

. . . daily throughout the project

Yes. The Fourth Agile Principle expects you to work with your customer daily throughout the project. The reason for this is obvious – you’re in touch with the people you’re doing work for. Talking to them and communicating with them to get questions answered, get feedback, etc. means two things:

  • You’re better directed towards the goal (even when it changes).
  • It develops good teamwork (which leads to informal improvements).

Yes, you are in contact daily, interacting, daily, and by now you’re probably thinking “how the heck can I do that?”

Ideally, you’d be in touch with people you’re doing work for all the time; indeed, ideally you’d work with them in person. In actual reality, in an age of conference calls and distributed teams, it’s a lot harder to work with people daily. I find the best way to solve this is – literally – just do your best and be aware of it.

It’s an ideal to aspire you. A few things I’ve found that help are:

  • Chat programs. Just passing an update to someone can help.
  • Email summaries and statuses. Sending quick daily updates helps.
  • Open Hours. Have a time in your schedule where someone can contact you; maybe you even sit in on a conference call or voice chat and anyone can swing by.
  • Talk to some if not all people. If your customer contact involves multiple people, touch base and work with as many of them as you can, even if it can’t be or doesn’t need to be all.
  • Cultivate customer communication. Help the customer develop this communicate-with-team attitude as well.
  • Radiators. Have some kind of chart, status sheet, document dump, working beta, that people can look at and use to get update. It’s passive communication, but it’s something.

I tend to solve the need for regular communication by mixing regular methods (daily updates, radiators) and informal (using chat programs and upates). Combined together, people stay in touch overall, even if individual methods don’t cover everyone.

And yes, trying to convince people daily communication is a good idea may be hard. If you’ve got people who are heads down, who like their privacy, etc. it may be harder. Cultivating this is going to be a bit of work.

Ultimately, I find this part of the Fourth Principle ultimately wraps up with the first part. You work together, you cooperate. As you do so, you’re better able to communicate daily because you’re more of a team.

But there’s a complication . . .

The Fourth Principle’s Complication: Client and Audience

The Fourth principle may sound hard to implement, but it’s an easy one – except but there’s another wrinkle. There’s the customer and then there’s the audience . . .

If you’re doing a logo, it’s easy – the customer asks for a logo. You make it. The customer’s customers, the “audience” may or may not like it, but it’s probably no big deal.

But what if you’re making a tutorial? Someone may ask you to make that tutorial, and you work as a team, but isnt the audience someone you need to keep in mind, because that tutorial is for THEM. The audience is also a bit more of a customer.

Now take this all the way; you’re an author. You have no direct customer or customer team, just a lot of readers, some of which you’re in touch with some of which you aren’t. How do you collaborate with that ?

When working to use the Fourth Principle as guidance, you’ll need to understand just who the customer is and just who the audience is. It might not be easy.

Rounding Up

Let’s review the Fourth Agile Principle for Creatives:

  • Delivering useable work focuses your efforts on what to deliver and how to deliver.
  • By delivering work as early as possible, you get feedback on the work you’ve done, which improves the results and communications.
  • Delivering work frequently creates feedback, communication, trust, and transparency.
  • Frequent delivery of useable work requires you to develop the best way to deliver, improving how you operate.
  • The shorter the timeframe the better, as it increases all the advantages of delivering useable work.
  • Frequent delivery of work provides direction, guidance, communication, and builds trust – areas that creative work needs, but that are also very challenging.

One simple Principle that packs a lot of benefits – and a lot of challenges – in. Worth taking to heart, just be ready for the actions it’ll take to make it real.

But, you’re someone that probably wants to improve and grow – as does everyone on your team. Let’s look at that in the Fifth Agile Principle.

– Steve

Agile Creativity – Principle #3: Frequent Useable Delivery

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

All right now let’s get to what the Third Agile Principle and what it means for creatives, and continue our journey to apply the Agile Manifest to creative work.

I’m sorry, Third Principle of Agile Software. In fact, it’s kinda software-heavy Principle, which means for creatives we’ve got to rethink it a bit. Let’s take a look:

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

This is pretty clear: deliver actual stuff often. It’s just it assumes that you’re delivering software and that you deliver within a given timeframe. As a creative, you’re probably not delivering software, and we know all to well some creative works need delivery in compressed timeframes.

Let’s not constrain ourselves and think of the third principle this way:

Deliver useable work frequently, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Pretty clear? Let’s break it down and see what it means from you. This one is *dense.*

Deliver Useable Work . . .

Whatever you give to a client, customer, etc. should be something usable. It may be rough, it may be incomplete, it may be rather bad. But you deliver something they can use, even if upon using it they think “this needs a lot of improvement.”

So why are you doing this for them – and perhaps to them?

First, usable work gets you feedback. A (somewhat) useable product, like a logo or document, means people can evaluate how you’re doing and give directions – or confirmation. It may mean they can even put your work into use, which means they get feedback to pass on from other people. For creative works, which have so many variables, early feedback is important as it helps you navigate to completion.

(Shades of Principle #2).

Second, focusing on useable work focuses you on making things people want and need. What is the highest priority to do? What makes something “usable” versus just “better?” Asking these questions means you are more likely to focus on what’s important; developing a new logo that looks right is better than slightly tweaking RGB codes to get the perfect blue half the population can’t tell from most other blues.

Third, this focuses you on delivery. You have to figure how tomake whatever you do actually deliverable and accessible – which can be very revealing. Having to make something that people can use means considering everything from file formats to image sizes to spellchecked documents. You have to ask just what to do first and in what order. This is a great way to reign in your creative ideas and focus on something you can actually give solid form.

These three words are a great way to focus on getting the job done – delivering the right thing so you get feedback. It’d be great to get that early, in fact . . .

EXERCISE: Think of one of your latest creative works. What made it “deliverable” – and how much work did that take over doing the actual work?

 . . . Frequently

If you’re going to actually give people a usable result, be it a comic strip or a piece of a costume, you don’t want to wait a long time for feedback. So when you deliver, whatever you deliver, however pathetic (but functional) it is, deliver it frequently.

Frequent delivery of work means the people you’re doing it for give you feedback more often. With more feedback, the next delivery becomes better (and perhaps faster). Frequent delivery means a dialogue, and enhances communications. In fact, frequent delivery can help lower barriers (psychological and institutional) as people get used to communicating and find new ways to do it.

This is very important in creative work as, with so many variables, communications helps direct your efforts.

With this frequent delivery, people also build trust. When a creative provides results to a client, even if incomplete, they’re taking the lid off of their process and giving people a view of how they work. When a client gives honest feedback that helps, the creative can trust them more. In both cases things are much more open and obvious.

This is very important in creative work as, with so many options and directions, and with work often being personal, mistrust or miscommunication can occur too easily.

Behind the scenes, thinking Frequency also means you restructure your work so you can deliver effectively. This can be challenging and even contradictory, say delivering the later chapter of a book earlier as it’s easier to do or more vital. But when you think frequent delivery, you think about how to deliver better.

“Frequently.” That one word in the Principle covers a whole lot.

EXERCISE: Think of someone you worked for where there was a lot of mistrust. How could more frequent deliver or communications have helped lower that mistrust?

 . . . With A Preference For A Shorter Timescale

Well if you’re delivering all this useable work frequently, getting all that feedback, thinking how to make things deliverable, you also want to do it as often as possible. The shorter the better.

This part of the principle accelerates all of the other benefits:

  • The faster you deliver the more feedback you get.
  • The faster you deliver the more you communicate in general.
  • The faster you deliver the more you optimize your work.
  • The faster you deliver the more transparent you are.
  • The faster you deliver the faster you get any mistakes out of the way (on all sides).

If there’s a challenge, it’s deciding just how frequent you really need to deliver. This is something to figure out between yourself, your client, any co-workers, and harsh reality.

This “more often” can get pretty common. After all you could optimize work to deliver daily or every other day. You might work directly with a client for a time or for an hour each day. If it works and delivers value then give it a try. In creative work, the more feedback the better.

By the way, I reccomend the timescale you use be regular if possible. Having an idea of when you meet, or when someone is editing a document, or when you have to send a file increases predictability.

EXERCISE: How fast do you usually deliver work to a client, and why do you work in that timeframe? Have you tried other timeframes – or any?

A Simple Principle With Many Repercussions

Delivering useable work frequently sounds simple – perhaps one of the simplest ofa the Principles, but it like all Principles it has hidden depths. Frequent delivery of useable work does everything from making you consider your work to enhancing communication. Besides, if you get anything wrong on the work or anything else, you get that fast feedback.

Work with people, clients and co-workers, to get that rapid and effective delivery into your creative works. You’ll be glad you did – or if you aren’t glad, you will be iteratively.

So in review:

  • Delivering useable work focuses your efforts on what to deliver and how to deliver.
  • By delivering work as early as possible, you get feedback on the work you’ve done, which improves the results and communications.
  • Delivering work frequently creates feedback, communication, trust, and transparency.
  • Frequent delivery of useable work requires you to develop the best way to deliver, improving how you operate.
  • The shorter the timeframe the better, as it increasea ll the advantages of delivering useable work.
  • Frequent delivery of work provides direction, guidance, communication, and builds trust – areas that creative work needs, but that are also very challenging.

 

 

– Steve

My Personal Agile: Work

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

Now let’s get on to the next step of my Personal Agile – doing actual work! You’ve got your Sprint Backlog, which is everything you plan to do this sprint (a month) so let’s go.

How Do I Start?

Every day I look at my Sprint Backlog and figure what I should do and want to do. Then I do it. In time you get into a rhythm where you unconsciously know what you want to get done – usually.

Yeah, that’s it. A daily review – maybe more than once a day – and doing stuff. Sounds simple? Of course it is – because you’ve thought this over and taken a manageable chunk of stuff to do. One of the great parts of Agile methods is that you get enough mindwork done up front and break stuff into manageable chunks that it’s easy to focus.

Well, What Do I Do First?

That’s pretty much up to you. In general, you should tackle highest priority work first and work your way down.

In practice, it’s often not as clear cut:

  • There are time constraints on when some things have to get done. You may not list cleaning that grungy guest room sink as your highest priority, but mom’s visiting.
  • Some work may need approval, materials, etc. Those art supplies you needed are late.
  • Some work you can’t stand doing for an extended time period. Maybe you start mowing the lawn this evening but finish tomorrow (but hey, maybe your mowing should be two tasks or even two separate stories).
  • When you start things you quickly realize your priorities are off. You really don’t need those new clothes.

Priority order is a good guide, but the only one.  Do what works.

Sticking With Things

To make sure you progress and stay focused, you want to stick with work.  Here’s a look at what I do:

  • If you take a task, make sure it’s one you can complete in one sitting or one that you’ll get done without anything else interrupting. For instance if you want to write up an essay but don’t finish it before bed, then the next day that’s your top priority.
  • Once you start tasks in a story, that story should (more or less) be your top priority. This lets you focus on delivering value. It also helps get the Story out of your mind. Remember, good breakdown means more stories with less tasks, and that makes this easier.
  • In all cases, try to focus on something being done and complete. Deliver value – or parts of value.

Sticking with something helps you stay focused and keeps you from the mental waste of switching gears over and over.  In a lot of cases it’s better to finish something and start the next thing unless you really have to.

How Do I Track Work?

You want to track the work you’re doing and to know what you’re up to and what you’ve done.  Here’s what I do:

When you start a task, move the “hours” estimate into the appropriate column, and keep moving it. This way you’re tracking work done:

  • Define – You’re fleshing it out and getting ready.
  • Developing – You’re doing it.
  • Review – You (or someone else) are confirming it’s done.
  • Done – Well, duh. Done. Congrats.

This is why I keep totals at on my spreadsheet so, at a glance, I know how many “hours” of work are done where. I’ll go into this more later.

One thing you’ll note is that I track the state of every Task (some methods only do stories). I find if you track and validate Tasks, the stories usually take care of themselves – a truly well made Task may not complete the story but is verifiable. It also lets me follow my progress in miniature as I’m pretty focused on this.

You may only need to check your progress story-level. You can use a pivot table for this, or other forms of visualization I’ll cover next.

How Do I Avoid Being Overloaded?

OK, here’s where we get a new concept: Work In Progress.  This is important.

Work In Progress, aka WIP, comes from Kanban, and has been adopted into many Agile practices, including, of course, some variants of Scrum. The core idea is to limit what you’re working on so you focus – and so you find blockages to completion.

It’s simple – you set a limit on how much work can be in each column (Define, Developing, etc.).  This is usually only one item.  I usually limit it to one task, but sometimes it’s limited to one story.  Nothing can move ahead until there’s “space.”

This idea of moving ahead only when there’s space is called “Pull.”  You don’t push items forward – you pull them when available.  I find this comfort is very comforting, it changes your focus on work.

But what if you’ve got a task in Developing, it’s done, but you have another task in Review waiting on approval? You don’t move that Developing task. It sits. You can either go Define a task and do some research, or try to get the task in Review, well, reviewed.

If all three are filled up? If your Defined thing is Defined, your Developed task is all developed, and you in-review task is in review? You should focus on the in-review task, but if everything is blocked, it may be time to take a break.

Now of course work may have to move forward, but you should acknowledge how you got blocked and fix it in the future. When things get jammed up that’s the sign of a flaw – and a sign you should change your approach so it doesn’t happen again.

Think this is tough? Some folks like to keep it down to one item being worked on period, no matter what the state. In fact, I’m an advocate, on the individual level, for doing this method. Sometimes I even succeed.

So what does all this stuff with Work In Progress Do?

  1. It forces you to avoid multitasking. Multitasking really distracts you, and the more you pile up half-done, the more you’re distracted.
  2. It rethinks work. The idea of “pull” of moving forward only when there’s space helps you see work in a more relaxed, appropriate manner.
  3. It reveals blockages and obstacles. Think of your workflow as a pipe system. If you restrict the amount that goes through it, when a jam up occurs you learn a lot. This is an enormous amount of Kanban – to the point where I’ve heard people say Kanban isn’t a management tool but just a way to find and remove blockages.
  4. It works better with good work breakdowns, so helps validate them.

Now because life gets complicated, I practice what I call WIP 1+1. That means the usual limit applies, BUT I allow myself to work on something else as long as I can get it finished in one go. This means if, say, something is sitting at my editors, I can go do some cooking or clean the bathroom. But I wouldn’t start something that may need another editor’s attention.

As noted, I do this on the task level.  You might find it works on the story level.

What If Something Takes Longer Than I Estimated?

That’s fine, that’s OK. It’s something to note for review at the end of the sprint.

If this requires you to cut work, fine. Figure what the least priority items are and don’t do them unless you suddenly have time. You’ll review this.

One thing I do is change my estimate to fit my new findings.

What If I Get Everything Done Earlier?

Well you could take a break. Otherwise, just bring the topmost items in from the Backlog into the Sprint Backlog, one at a time. Finish those items before taking something else off the backlog.

So This Is Just Taking A List Of Stuff And Trying To Do It Without Multitasking In A Given Timeframe?

Well, yes. Welcome to Agile, where we cut through the bullshit or break the bullshit into manageable pieces.

Next Up?

This may seem easy, but we’ll talk tools and visualization.

– Steve