This was an interval punctuated by travel. First we spent a week in Oak Island, NC hanging out with friends and relaxing. Then Avdi was off to Boulder, CO, to get started on his new job. Despite spending so much time out of the house, we somehow managed to make this one of the most productive frolics yet.
This frolic was complicated by illness and a late start. We got a great deal done anyway, but much of it went un-planned and un-recorded. Highlights: Avdi exited his old job, and finished the family’s 2009 income taxes, despite being sick for a week. Stacey put together a traditional American Irish St. Patrick’s Day dinner complete with good friends and lots of Guinness. Avdi partially rehabilitated two laptops. And we prepared for our long-awaited vacation to Oak Island, NC.
Stats
13 points of effort scheduled, down from 29 in last frolic.
7 points completed, down from 18 in last frolic.
6 points left incomplete.
3 un-estimated tasks completed.
What Went Well
We had good food and a lively table of friends for St. Patrick’s Day (not included in the plan)
Avdi’s exited his previous job smoothly despite being sick the whole week
Got far more done than we actually tracked
Stacey and Lily made fabulous food for the CSA pot luck
Figured out the correct cat food portions – no more whiny underfed cats.
We were very social – lots of get-togethers.
Massive reduction in grocery costs, thanks to new coupon know-how and the discovery of a bargain grocery store (thanks Kimberly!)
Lily’s snake finally shed
Not So Well
We all got sick
Still no trip to the zoo
Got frolic board cards posted a week late, which led to reduced task visibility, which led to getting fewer of our planned tasks done.
Didn’t track as much of what we did as we did last frolic.
One thing that putting up an iterationfrolic board has really brought home is just how much we expect of ourselves in a given three-week period. We can’t even fit it all on the board! It’s a real eye-opener, having this kind of visual representation of our project load.
I mentioned in the first Agile Living post that we weren’t happy with the term “iteration” for our three-week planning periods. It’s fine for software development but it’s too stuffy for family life.
One alternate term used in the software industry is “sprint”. But even this sounded much too intense and energetic for The Lazy Faire. So after much consideration, we’ve settled on an acceptable substitute term: a frolic.
In a couple of our Agile Living posts I’ve made reference to “point values” for projects. This is another practice inspired by Agile software development. Before adding a project to the current or upcoming iteration, we assign a point value to it. This is a value between 1 and 3, where 1 is the easiest, and 3 is the hardest.
These numbers have only relative significance. They are not connected to any real-world metric such as “days required to complete”. They are interpreted relative to each other - a 1-point task is easier to a 2-point project, which is easier than a 3-point project. The only relation to a concrete measurement is that they must all be accomplishable within a single three-week iteration.
If it’s not a concrete number measure, how do we judge task difficulty? It’s a gut-feeling call - is this project one of the easier ones we’ve considered, moderate, or one of the hardest we might attempt to accomplish in three weeks? We also explicitly include emotional difficulty in our estimates. One project might require only a single phone call to accomplish, but that phone call might be one that causes us significant anxiety, causing the project to receive a “3″ rating. The goal is to come up with an overall rating of effort, whether from physical effort, financial outlay, length of time required, or emotional resistance.
Planning poker
The actual project estimation is conducted almost like a game - agile software refers to this step as “planning poker”. One of us counts to three, and on three we both hold up a number of fingers equal to our estimate. The point of estimating simultaneously is so that neither of us influences the other beforehand. Remember, this is all about gut feeling. Once we’ve both shown our “hand”, if both estimates are equal, we write the number on the card, circle it, and move on to the next card. If not, we discuss.
Note that we do not try to “split the difference” between the differing estimates. Usually a difference in estimate indicates that we understand the project differently, or that one of us has thought of a complication the other is unaware of. So a difference in estimation is an opportunity to come to a better understanding of the project being estimated. We don’t put a final estimate on the card until we’ve reached a consensus.
Rationale
The primary goal of estimation is achieving predictability. At the end of each iteration, during the retrospective, we record how many points’ worth of effort we scheduled, versus how many we actually accomplished. As we become more adept at estimation, and as we collect more statistics, we will come to a better and better understanding of how much work we can reasonably expect ourselves to accomplish in a given iteration. This, in turn, will help us move forward with our various plans at a steady, sustainable pace - having confidence that we can accomplish what we’ve set out to do.
A core practice of many Agile software teams is the retrospective. This is a meeting held at the end of the iteration to look back over the iteration and discuss what went well and what could have gone better. It’s not a witch hunt or a blame-fest. The iteration is performed with the assumption that everything that was done (or not done) was done to the best of the participants’ ability at the time. The idea is to use the insight gained from the retrospective to improve the next iteration.
We’ve incorporated retrospectives into our “agile living” practice at home. We schedule one at the end of each three-week iteration. When it’s time for the iteration, we pack up our 3×5 cards and sticky notes and head to a restaurant or cafe. This part is important: we want the retrospective to be a treat, not a chore. And we want to be on neutral ground, without the usual distractions of home.
Once there, with drinks in hand, we begin the retrospective. We start with statistics. Referring to the planning cards form the iteration that is ending, we list:
How many points’ worth of effort we planned
How many points’ worth of effort we accomplished
How many points’ worth of effort we failed to accomplish
We don’t dwell on the ratio of accomplished to not-accomplished. The numbers are just a way, over time, to get a feel for how much effort we are capable of accomplishing in a three-week period.
Then we discuss three things:
What went well
What didn’t go so well
Ideas
For each category I put a sticky note down on the table. We move through these three categories roughly in order, but it doesn’t have to be a strict progression. As we think of things that went well, things that didn’t go so well, and ideas for the future, we scribble them down on a 3×5 card and lay the card down under the appropriate sticky.
What went well
E.g. “spent a lot of quality time with the kids” or “felt really energetic”. These are the things we felt good about over the course of the iteration. They could be things we accomplished, good things that happened in our lives, or just positive feelings.
What didn’t go so well
E.g. “didn’t get enough sleep” or “the basement flooded”.
Ideas
This category is for ideas for future iterations. It’s pretty wide-open: it could be specific projects or tasks, or daily practices to try out, or new strategies for tackling tasks that we didn’t do so well at in the preceding iteration.
Conclusion
Eventually we stop thinking of new items to add to the three stacks, at which point we wrap up the iteration. I collect the three card stacks and transcribe them online as soon as practical.
Rationale
The goal of the retrospective is reflection. It’s a way of being mindful as a family, and hopefully of bringing our unconscious joys, concerns, impediments, and ideas to conscious attention. This gives us a chance to re-create circumstances that worked well, minimize conditions which caused us pain, and to think as a family about how we approach our daily challenges.
We’re still working the kinks out of our “agile living” system here at The Lazy Faire. One of the things that quickly became clear during the last iteration was that having our goals posted online simply didn’t give them enough visibility. It was too much of an effort to get online and review the plan. To remedy this, I installed a 3′x2′ corkboard in our bedroom hallway, where we’d walk past it every day. I divided it into three sections: one for finished projects, one for the current iteration, and one for the upcoming iteration. I also bought a stack of small sticky notes. These we use to tag each active project with a “next action”. When we finish a project’s next action, we can quickly slap a new next action onto the card, and so on until the project is finished.
This gives us the ability to see at a glance where we stand with regard to our goals for the current three-week period. It also gives us an easy way to start incrementally planning the next iteration. So far it has been working well.
Welcome to The Lazy Faire, a family blog about the practice of abundance in every aspect of life. Your hosts are Stacey and Avdi. Together with our children we are building our dreams and writing about the journey.
[More]
