Currently reading: Homegoing: A novel by Yaa Gyasi 📚
Finished reading: The Bookbinder by Pip Williams 📚by the author of, and adjacent to The Dictionary of Lost Words. A sweet novel, set during WW1 in Oxford, England. I enjoyed it.
Explain Agile Like I'm 5
Hey, are your projects going the way you want? Have you heard the words “Agile” and “Scrum” and wondered what they mean and whether this project management style can help you and your teams?
🚀 I’m going to do that thing where we say “Explain it like I’m 5 years old.”
🎈 Imagine your mom wants you to clean your room. You could just move everything on the floor to under your bed. But your mom might not be too happy about that. ☹️
Instead, if we were using Agile and Scrum to manage this room cleaning project, you’d start by cleaning your room for a few minutes. Then you’d ask Mom to come back and take a look at what you’ve done. If you started out by putting stuff under your bed 🛏️, Mom now has a chance to say “No, honey, under your bed isn’t what I wanted. Try putting the toys in your toy box instead.”
You work a few more minutes and ask Mom to come in again. This time, she says “Yes, honey, that’s great that you put your toys into the toy box, but you’ve put some of your dirty clothes in there, too👖. Clothes should go in the hamper in the hallway.”
😄 By doing these short cycles of work and review, our 5-year-old can only go a short way down the path of doing the wrong thing. And Mom has the opportunity to provide quick feedback before a lot of time has been spent going in the wrong direction.
How about you? Do you have the experience of getting started on a project and after you’ve done a bunch of work, your stakeholders say “That’s not what I wanted?” Agile and Scrum help us to move in the right direction, building what our stakeholders want … and need to solve their problems.
I’m @agilelisa, please reach out to me if you’d like to chat further.
Currently reading: The Bookbinder by Pip Williams 📚
Agile is like Little Science
I’m enjoying these posts by Adam Mastroianni. He’s a scientist arguing with academia. In this essay, he talks about Big Science and Little Science. I see parallels between Little Science and Agile project management. We run short, little experiments. Not every experiment is successful but we always learn something.
Let’s build a fleet and change the world
After all, I didn’t come aboard to administer the ship but to explore the ocean. And the best way to explore is to have many ships going in all different directions, not one ship that can only go in one direction. Some of those ships will end up going in circles or crashing into reefs or getting blown over in storms. People on one ship will often think the people on the other ships are wasting their time: “You’re heading to the Gulf of Aden? You fools, there’s nothing to learn there!” But if one ship discovers something—a new island, a new kind of fish, a new passage between continents—and sends out a signal, now everybody knows about it.
Finished reading: Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery 📚What a sweet, delicious, thought-provoking book. My attitude toward turtles has been changed from mostly indifferent to “Wow, Turtles!” This book will also serve as a good history of what pandemic time was like.
Currently reading: Victory City by Salman Rushdie 📚
Finished reading: Women Talking by Miriam Toews 📚such a strange book. I’m thinking I should watch the movie.
Finished reading: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett 📚the last Disc World book, sweet and poignant for that reason.
Highline in the morning. I love that the Highline exists. NYC
Up on the Highline on a gorgeous, warm evening.
Currently reading: Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery 📚
Currently reading: The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett 📚
Finished reading: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher 📚I like the author’s writing style and interesting takes on redoing fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty. But I was disturbed that the villain here is what sounds like a severely autistic child.
Finished reading: The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland 📚Highly recommended. We’re all on the path to a disability. This book talks about how to approach using this knowledge, based on the author’s gradual ascent toward blindness. Lots of good information about the blind community, too.
Currently reading: Thornhedge by T. Kingfisher 📚
Finished reading: The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec 📚A fun read, mild magic fantasy set in pre-1000 AD Norway.
Currently reading: The Country of the Blind by Andrew Leland 📚I’m only a little way into this and am already impressed by how good it is. The author is losing his vision and has many interesting things to say.
Finished reading: Learning Korean: Recipes for Home Cooking by Peter Serpico 📚Saying again how much I love this new cookbook on how to do Korean home cooking.
Currently reading: The Weaver and the Witch Queen by Genevieve Gornichec 📚
Finished reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚So thought-provoking. Not being a Marxist scholar myself, I had to catch up to even understand the concept of Primitive Accumulation, but overall this is an excellent and interesting read.
Finished reading: The Invisible Hour by Alice Hoffman 📚I didn’t love it. There’s an odd plot involving sex with Nathaniel Hawthorne. There’s a bunch of heavy-handed opinion masquerading as dialogue. Overall, not as magical as other of her books.
Finished reading: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh 📚interesting! Slightly feminist anti-fascist space opera with time slips.