Being agile
Sprinkling a pinch of agile into the work-sharing sheet.
*While bringing user stories into in-house practice, I somehow ended up all the way at agile. So, backing into it like a cow, I started thinking about how to share work in an agile-ish (epic- or story-based) way.
As many have predicted, the line between design and planning has blurred. (Of course, only at the level of screen design..) Somewhere along the way, "prototyping" now makes us think of Figma, XD, or Sketch instead of design thinking.
And being smooth with those tools is now called "doing — that."
Lately, with product-centric titles like PO/PM/PD on the rise, agile is rising again. And this is where déjà vu kicks in. "Agile" makes most of us think of Jira, Confluence, Asana.
And being smooth with those tools is called "being — like that."
This is a habit. It started with the college entrance exam and has kept going in the workplace, I suspect.
So;;
0. Little by little, only as much as you know, so you and I are both still in the early days — that's a good thing.
No matter how good a piece of clothing is, if it's in the closet it's useless, and if it doesn't fit your body, it's just provisional-recycling-bin material. Agile presupposes participation and communication. So, with teammates, we updated things only as much as we knew, only as much as we could use, by experiencing them in person, little by little. Until someone felt a need or a pain, we didn't update the template. It usually took about three months. I did this with teammates at three companies running their own services, and here I'll briefly share the most recent version.
1. Start with "me" (the individual, the teammate), not a company work-tool — a private personal schedule tool.
2. Then "us" (the team), experience the work-file "Danawa"-style sheet inside the team first.
3. Build the team dashboard, from cleaning duty all the way to individual TASK goals.
4. Share across departments, add a pinch of OKR, now — slowly shift from a simple todo list toward a TASK that includes the "why."
Add team-wide status info and this week's team-wide goal. So we can clearly see where we all are, right now.
6. Half a spoon of Kanban, 1g of agile, another pinch of OKR, once Kanban is folded in, the sheet gets simpler. But simple isn't always the answer. A lot is still unsolved. That's why it's fascinating. Until it becomes a sheet everyone uses for motivation rather than tasking, this is forever present-tense.
P.S.
For sharing purposes, teammate names and work details have been dummied out. The sheet's context isn't included. Also, what I want to emphasize? is that this work-sharing sheet has 'no template.' Necessary info and keywords are added and removed as needed, moment by moment. I always say this to teammates, so I wanted to practice it too:
'A planner — no, a designer, a developer, anyone of any age or gender, even MZ — the moment they get trapped inside a template (a frame), they've become a boomer.'
