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 thoughts on project management
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.
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.