Lisa Sieverts

Currently reading: Fatherland by Burkhard Bilger 📚

Currently reading: The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson) 📚

Finished reading: Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson 📚Notched another one from the “Robert Macfarlane Recommended Reading” list. Written in the 1920s, a beautiful but also brutal naturalist work about the short life of an otter in the English countryside.

Currently reading: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry 📚

Currently reading: White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link 📚

Finished reading: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton 📚quite good. A Shakespearean ending that takes your breath away but also makes sense as a commentary on our late-capitalism world.

Currently reading: The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf 📚

Are you terrified when someone asks “When will this be done?”

Whether you’re being asked about a project or a task, it’s often hard to answer this question.

Here’s what I know.

🏁 The best way to figure out how long a task will take is to do the work

It’s often better not to estimate. It’s time that would be better spent working. Do the work, show your results, get feedback, and keep going.

👀 Consider why people are asking for the estimate: what information are they really looking for?

When you understand their needs, you may be able to answer their question without having to give them a date.

💯 A range is better than a single number.

The likelihood that your task or project will be completed at a specific, predicted moment is near zero. When you and your team can provide a range that feels accurate, you’re sharing useful and actionable information.

It’s FAR better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.

We’re going to Reykjavik Iceland in a few weeks. Any travel experts have “must see” recommendations for us? I like getting off the beaten track.

Currently reading: Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson 📚

Finished reading: The Years by Annie Ernaux 📚This took me a while to get through but in the end, I agree that it’s a masterpiece. It manages to be the story of the past 60 years for a white, educated woman and yet general, too. She captures so much in so few words. Translated from the French.

Finished reading: Loot by Tania James 📚An excellent novel, set in India and France, touches on history, colonialism, growing up bi-racial, and more heavy topics while also being an enjoyable read. Highly recommended.

Currently reading: Poor and of Lo Make, the Diary of Abner Sanger (late 1700s) by 📚

Currently reading: Loot by Tania James 📚

Finished reading: All Souls Lost by Dan Moren 📚a fun hard-boiled detective story with ghosts and ghouls.

Are you a Planner or a Pantser? And what does this mean about your options for doing projects in your organization?

Planner vs. Pantser is a distinction made when folks talk about National Novel Writing Month — taking place now in November.

📖 Planners plot out their novels in advance and write within their outline.

🦄 Pantsers have a vision about where they want to go but do their writing every day “by the seat of their pants,” letting the plot emerge.

This reminds me of the distinction between very planning-focused Waterfall project management and the more flexible Agile approach.

But with projects, it’s more than just your personality that determines your method!

💥 We must recognize that many projects CANNOT BE PLANNED.

These projects have such inherent uncertainty that the most efficient and effective approach looks more like Pantser. Examples: 🎁 New Product Development 🎰 New Business ⏳Process Improvement

We must be successful with these projects, but we can’t plan them out in advance. I recommend an Agile approach for these projects. Using robust processes, we make great decisions all along the way and complete these projects quickly and with incredible quality.

TIL: It’s possible to set Google Docs to a “Pageless” layout so you don’t see the annoying page break line. If I’m never going to print a document, why do I need to see that line?

Go to File and then Page Setup. · At the top of the dialog window, select Pages or Pageless.

Currently reading Resist by Lee Schneider @leeS 📚

Finished reading: Homegoing: A novel by Yaa Gyasi 📚Definitely worth reading. It contains scenes of abuse and violence but only in service to the story and the history. Half-sisters in the 1700s, one stays in Africa, one is enslaved and taken to America. It’s the story of all the generations to now.

Currently reading: All Souls Lost by Dan Moren 📚

Finished reading: Victory City by Salman Rushdie 📚Worth reading. A good tale about how the historian gets to tell the history. Plenty to think about.

Comparing health care in the US and Portugal

Possibly interesting for our Lisbon friends. Definitely interesting for those of us in the US who want to imagine a more sensible health insurance scenario. No paywall link.

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.

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.