Living agile in a post COVID19 world
An Agile approach to restarting your business and life
To survive the crisis you may want to learn a few Agile Project Management tricks
Groundhog days
We are already 45 days in quarantine (or is it more?) and they all seem alarmingly the same. Yet, everything outside our microcosm is moving at a neck-breaking pace. Take a look at the news just 2 months ago. They sound naively outdated. What were we thinking back then? Early March I traveled to London and it feels like ages ago. Last Christmas season seems like it never happened.
Crises are accelerators. As I follow the news and developments, I find it difficult to keep up.
Regardless of how much time I spend to keep myself well informed (and believe me it is a lot), despite the daily briefings and alerts I receive from major news sites (or perhaps just because of that) it seems almost impossible to plan for the next day. Both in terms of family life and in terms of business.
Before the unavoidable and necessary confinement, I had an elaborate and systemic way to plan my month, my week and my day. I was laying out a meticulous daily schedule of training, running, reading, studying, working, socialising, watching Netflix, sleeping. I was not always able to follow it, but for the most part I was quite successful.
Planning collapsed as we moved deeper into the crisis and as uncertainty and an undetected, underlying anxiety crept in.
In the beginning, I was just kicking the events down my calendar. Shifting days. Then I added a tag in the beginning of the event title [TBR]= To Be Rescheduled. Recently I deleted all my scheduled events and activities all together. By then all major events I was planning to attend, had been canceled anyway. So, I now have a clean calendar and a long list of activities and events that need to be rescheduled. Sometime. My daily habits remained more or less the same, albeit adapted to the new situation. I can’t run in the mountains and it’s not that easy to avoid the kitchen. Do the math.
Welcome to Agile Management
However, as I am struggling to organise my next months, my projects, my travels, my activities, I realise that there is a tool, I’ve been using for many years in my IT projects, which may come handy.
Bare with me for a moment. I promise I am not going to bore you with technicalities.
I guess that you understand (more or less) what Project Management is. There are plenty of fancy definitions but the idea is that you plan before you implement and you control your outputs throughout the way. The idea of planning is of course central in every creative procedure.
Project Management worked perfectly in the industrial world, and found excellent applications in engineering (Wikipedia). With the appearance of computers (we are talking 60s-70s now), IT engineers applied its principles in software development. Nevertheless, as the IT industry evolved and became more and more complex, it was clear that the traditional Project Management was too linear. Too restricting. You could not easily introduce changes in the middle of the project, you could not start a project without detailed designs and you usually needed elaborate specifications. It simply did not work in complex, ever-changing environments like Information Technology.
Even when the goals are clearly defined, the complexity of the IT systems, the unanticipated changes in scope (often in the middle of the project), the gap between SW developers and end users understanding, leads more often than not, to extreme delays, scope creeps, inflated budgets. Nobody is happy and everyone blames the other. A new approach was needed.
Agile SW development took form in 2001, with the Agile Manifesto. A short document that starts with 4 simple statements:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Although you may relate, in some way, with most of them, pay attention to the last one: Responding to change over following a plan. This heretic statement does not mean that you don’t need a plan, but you should be flexible and adaptable enough to respond to the inevitable changes. And from what we know till now, there will be plenty of changes. Some of them anticipated. A lot of them not.
What is Scrum?
One of the most popular and efficient approaches to Agile SW development is Scrum. It is a relative simple methodology (or in more fancy terminology, a process framework) for managing complex knowledge work. (See: What is Scrum?). I do not want to start explaining the Scrum process here. Better and more qualified people have done that already. (See: Scrum Alliance)
I will rather try to suggest how we can use some of the tools and principles of Agile PM and Scrum in our everyday life and work. By doing this I will inevitably oversimplify and most probably misrepresent some ideas, but I believe it’s worth the risk.
In Scrum we use Sprints. A Sprint is a time period of a month or less. I would say that in our post covid-19 world a week or a fortnight are more fitting timeframes. Every Sprint always has:
- a goal (what you expect at the end)
- a list of tasks that are needed to reach our goal
- a short planning session (1 day of planning for the whole month)
- daily meetings to evaluate our course (scrums) and
- a review in the end (to evaluate our results).
We try not to change course in the middle of the Sprint, but if something happens that makes our goals obsolete, then we cancel it and start again.
Let me give you a generic example:
The authorities have announced an exit strategy and your business is ready to resume after almost 2 months of inactivity. Don’t try to strategise. We are in still in crisis mode. Your ultimate goal is to restart your business and adapt to the new situation.
- Define your Sprint #1 goal: e.g. Reinstate my business in 60% of its capacity.
- Make a list of the activities/tasks you need to complete. e.g. reorganise the personnel, comply with new public health regulations, train personnel on new procedures, inform customers. This list is open ended.
- Prioritise: from the above list, pick the tasks that are more pressing to complete and you need to implement in your first sprint (#1). Invest some time to do it right.
- Discuss daily with your colleagues, your team, your employees how you are doing. Are you progressing? Do you face problems? Do you need changes?
Btw we are talking about short daily briefings of 15' not endless discussions on the future of mankind after the pandemic. - At the end of the sprint, reflect on the progress. Are you happy? Did you reach your sprint goal? How do you proceed from now on?
- Start again. Are there any new developments? Any changes? Factor them in. Go back to Step 1 and plan your next sprint (#2).
This process will eventually stop once you have achieved the ultimate goals you have set in the beginning. Once your operations became stable then this project is finish. You can always start a new one.
The same methodology can be used to achieve something with your family, even something as simple as creating a new work-life schedule for all, in the new post COVID19 reality.
Adapt and build your own methodologies
There is no doubt that this unprecedented situation will not go away soon. It will create major shifts to society. Probably in a global level like never before in our lifetime. It is scary, it is stressful, it is unknown. Still, never before in a similar situation, had our world a stronger arsenal at its disposal. It is only a matter of time to win this.
Of course my suggested methodology is far from perfect or even complete. I can only hope that it can serve as a start for you to adapt one customised to your needs. Maybe now it is a good time to think about this.
References
A fascinating article for people outside the industry on how Agile SW management was born.
The 12 principles of Agile Manifesto
