Practicing disciplines
Today I’ve been pulling materials together to familiarize a new team with some concepts of scrum for the first time. I won’t be talking about doing twice the work in half the time. I will be talking about transparency and alignment from making work visible, capturing work in a backlog, and separating planning from doing.
None of these ideas are new or unique to scrum or agile. Making work visible is part of LEAN. Indeed, the popular kanban boards that comprise many project management approaches originate from organizing actual physical work such that it forms a visible queue. Capturing work in a backlog and separating planning from doing are concepts I personally associate with David Allen and Getting Things Done. I’m pretty sure Covey’s ABCs pre-date Allen (Still available in Classic, Compact, Monarch, and Pocket!), and I couldn’t tell you what predated that because it also predated me.
I don’t think any of these theories and techniques is perfect, nor are any of them a substitute for core competency in whatever you’re trying to do as a team. That said, one thing I like about agile is how it takes some of these ideas that can work well on an individual level and adapts them for a team. I also like that the recurring meetings are called ceremonies. Maybe that’s just marketing, but it’s arguably also accurate. They’re recurring activities (active meetings) that you undergo to maintain and advance a discipline.
On that note … it’s an odd quirk of language, isn’t it, that colloquially people “practice” certain disciplines like medicine or law, but you hear these terms less often in other disciplines? At the end of the day aren’t we all arguably practicing? Think about that the next time you board a bus and nod to the practicing driver.
Another thing I’ll be sharing with my team as we talk about agile is a concept from Oliver Burkman’s Four Thusand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Burkman argues that we’ll never get everything done, so the sooner we accept this limit-embracing life the sooner we can, at the very least, stop picking ourselves apart for, as I call it, the banal shortcomings of the human condition. “The real measure of any time management technique” according to Burkeman, “is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”
And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to neglect a tidy wrap up on this post in lieu of a few extra winks of sleep.