Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

So good news, Mike.

00:00:02

- What's that?

00:00:03

- I meditated.

00:00:04

- Hey, good job.

00:00:06

- Hey, bad news, Mike.

00:00:07

- What's that?

00:00:08

- I still don't get it.

00:00:10

(laughing)

00:00:11

I might understand what I'm doing wrong though.

00:00:14

- Okay.

00:00:15

- I shouldn't say doing wrong though.

00:00:16

I think part of what I do whenever I do this experiment

00:00:21

of meditation is I always do it in the morning.

00:00:24

And I always do it as part of my morning ritual.

00:00:27

Like I always slip it in there.

00:00:29

It's always going the exact same spot,

00:00:31

which is what I did this morning.

00:00:34

So I think I did it three times.

00:00:37

Yeah, the last three days I've done it and I still don't.

00:00:39

Yeah, nothing there.

00:00:40

I think instead of doing it at that point in time,

00:00:47

because I think what happens, I'm gonna try this tomorrow.

00:00:50

So we should talk about this next time

00:00:52

'cause I still feel like I'm missing something here.

00:00:57

And I think--

00:00:58

- Yeah, we can put it on follow up fourth time if you want.

00:01:00

(laughing)

00:01:03

- I don't wanna know how many times this action item has

00:01:05

gone around and around and around.

00:01:08

I think what I'm doing is by meditating in the morning,

00:01:12

I am already quite clear-headed at that moment.

00:01:16

Like I've already done a lot of things

00:01:17

that are borderline meditative as it is.

00:01:20

Like before I ever get to the time

00:01:22

when I'm going to meditate, I've already had breakfast.

00:01:25

I've done my morning Bible reading.

00:01:27

I've spent some time in prayer,

00:01:29

which you could probably argue

00:01:31

that that is a meditation in itself.

00:01:33

And then I'll come downstairs and go through this process

00:01:38

of trying to clear my head

00:01:40

when I've already done some things

00:01:41

that probably help in the same direction.

00:01:44

I think that might be why I never noticed anything with this.

00:01:48

That's my current theory as of about 15 minutes ago.

00:01:52

So it's just because I was reading through this thinking,

00:01:55

"Huh, I suppose I need an explanation on this."

00:01:58

(laughing)

00:01:59

And I think that's what it is.

00:02:01

- Yeah, I think that theory makes sense though.

00:02:03

- Seems logical.

00:02:04

So I think what I'm gonna do tomorrow for this,

00:02:07

so meditation can be on Joe's follow-up list

00:02:11

for the 18th time next week or next couple weeks.

00:02:15

I think what I'm gonna try doing

00:02:16

is not doing it first thing in the morning,

00:02:19

but waiting until like mid-morning, like say 10 a.m.,

00:02:23

whenever I've already been fighting fires,

00:02:26

I've been heads down on some things at work,

00:02:29

and then take a 10-minute break and go meditate.

00:02:32

I'm going to try that and see if that break in the day

00:02:37

makes a big difference or not.

00:02:39

That's my thought.

00:02:41

- It's a good idea.

00:02:41

I like it.

00:02:43

- We'll see if it sticks.

00:02:44

But for now, I still think it's a hokey thing at the moment.

00:02:49

- My money's unknown.

00:02:50

(laughing)

00:02:52

But I do think that this is giving it the best chance

00:02:55

it's ever gonna have coming apart if you're a routine.

00:02:58

- Yeah.

00:02:59

(laughing)

00:03:01

I will say that if that doesn't sell me on it,

00:03:05

I think I should just quit trying.

00:03:07

- Sure. - It's just not.

00:03:09

(laughing)

00:03:12

But I'm sure at some point we'll read a book on meditation

00:03:14

and I'll, you know, we'll read 10% happier

00:03:16

and then I'll wanna try it again.

00:03:17

That's the way this works.

00:03:19

- Yeah, so everybody go vote for that

00:03:20

if you wanna force Joe to--

00:03:22

- Oh, come on.

00:03:23

- To make this part of his daily routine.

00:03:25

(laughing)

00:03:27

- All right, can I get off this one now?

00:03:29

All right, I'm gonna go into something else.

00:03:32

Let's go into something much more, well, fun, I don't know.

00:03:35

Don't use emails to do list.

00:03:37

Let's just put this as #fail2.0, like that, yeah.

00:03:42

Still doing this, Mike.

00:03:44

Sorry.

00:03:45

- Come on.

00:03:46

- Sorry, not sorry.

00:03:48

I know, I know.

00:03:49

The problem is that I realized that there's so much

00:03:54

of my email that comes in that it's not worth the time

00:03:58

to put it into OmniFocus and then come back and do it later.

00:04:01

It's better to just let it sit there for the next 10 minutes

00:04:05

and then cycle them when I get to them.

00:04:09

But sometimes I get drawn away and I don't get back to it

00:04:12

so I get that.

00:04:13

So it does seem to work to some degree.

00:04:17

I get that I really shouldn't but it kind of works

00:04:22

to some degree.

00:04:23

So I don't know if I wanna say I don't wanna do this

00:04:26

or if it needs to go and follow up again next time,

00:04:29

I don't know.

00:04:31

I don't know what to do with it.

00:04:31

- Well, here's the thinking time question

00:04:35

that I'm gonna throw out to you right now

00:04:37

as we're gonna be talking about Scrum in a little bit here.

00:04:41

Key Tenet of Scrum is removing impediments

00:04:44

so that the work can get done faster.

00:04:47

Now I guarantee that email is an impediment

00:04:49

to the way that you work.

00:04:50

So the thinking time question would be

00:04:54

how can you remove email as an impediment

00:04:57

or an obstacle to getting your work done quicker?

00:05:00

I'm sure that if you view it through that lens

00:05:03

you can find a better way to do it.

00:05:05

I have no doubt that the way that you're doing it now

00:05:08

works just like the waterfall method

00:05:10

which we'll talk about in a little bit works,

00:05:12

quote unquote works.

00:05:14

Dang it, it's that quote unquote.

00:05:15

(laughs)

00:05:17

Sorry, you viewer.

00:05:17

- I do it intentionally at this point.

00:05:19

- But you go what I'm saying?

00:05:22

Like it's something that you've kind of resigned yourself

00:05:26

to the fact that I have to do this

00:05:28

and so I'm gonna do it and it's really not that bad.

00:05:30

So I'm just gonna keep doing it the way

00:05:31

that it's gonna be doing it.

00:05:32

But Scrum, if you really implement this,

00:05:34

kind of forces you to rethink the entire way that you work.

00:05:37

And so I would just challenge you to think about email

00:05:39

through that lens as well.

00:05:41

- So one thing you said there was that email being

00:05:43

an impediment to the work.

00:05:44

What if email is the work itself?

00:05:46

- Well email can be the work that itself

00:05:48

but going into the inbox is an impediment to the work itself.

00:05:51

So what is the most efficient way that you can get the things

00:05:53

that are in your email into whatever way you need to work?

00:05:57

So I don't know whatever system I know last time

00:05:59

or actually not last time, I think via text message

00:06:02

you were telling me that you were checking out Jira

00:06:05

and Atlassian and stuff like that.

00:06:06

So I don't know, maybe you get your customers

00:06:10

and this is gonna sound ridiculous if you've never done this

00:06:12

but maybe you have your customers or your clients

00:06:15

involved in your Jira boards.

00:06:16

I mean, that's a key element of Scrum too

00:06:18

is that the customers are involved

00:06:19

in the production of the work.

00:06:21

So I'm sure there's options.

00:06:23

I'm not sure that they will be better

00:06:24

than what you're currently doing

00:06:26

but I think it's worth considering them.

00:06:28

- Yeah.

00:06:29

- Especially as it pertains to email.

00:06:30

- Yeah, I don't know if, like for example

00:06:34

I've cycled 100 emails already today.

00:06:37

It's one o'clock in the afternoon as we're recording this.

00:06:41

So I've cycled a lot of email already

00:06:44

and I don't know that because I do this in intervals

00:06:49

it's not like I'm sitting here with my inbox open all day long.

00:06:52

Like I can't say that email has become an impediment

00:06:55

in that way but I know that like for example,

00:07:00

I've got, I don't even know how many is in there right now

00:07:03

'cause I was running through email just a little bit

00:07:05

before we jumped on here and I know that I left

00:07:09

at least 12 things on the list in my inbox

00:07:14

that I'll get to when we're done recording here

00:07:17

because I know I'm gonna be coming back

00:07:19

into my email at that point

00:07:20

and it's very likely that I'm gonna clear those out

00:07:23

in their entirety whenever I get to it.

00:07:26

So knowing that overarching amount of time

00:07:31

that I spend on those items would be greater

00:07:35

if I were to move it into say a flagged folder

00:07:38

or an action folder or into Omni Focus with a link.

00:07:42

Like the processing time is greater

00:07:45

and like the overall time is greater

00:07:48

if I do something with those rather than just get to them

00:07:51

when I come back to it.

00:07:52

Does that make sense?

00:07:53

I'm looking at the overall time.

00:07:55

- But you're gonna force me to talk about Scrum right now.

00:07:58

- Okay, well we can quit talking about this

00:08:00

and come back to it I guess.

00:08:02

- Well here's one final thought

00:08:04

and then we'll put a pin in this.

00:08:05

- Okay, email is a to-do list that other people can write on.

00:08:08

Every email that you get is an item in your backlog.

00:08:12

And as we talk about in this book,

00:08:14

the job of the product owner is to go through the backlog

00:08:18

and select the things that are of highest value.

00:08:20

If your goal is to get everything out of the inbox

00:08:23

you are assuming that whatever time you're gonna be spending

00:08:25

going through those messages

00:08:27

that those messages are the things of highest value.

00:08:30

And you really can't make that judgment

00:08:32

until you know how much story points those are bringing

00:08:37

or how much monetary value they're bringing

00:08:39

to the company or the organization.

00:08:41

You get what I'm saying?

00:08:42

You have to have a way of measuring those things

00:08:43

rather than just I gotta get to zero

00:08:45

because that's what my clients expect.

00:08:47

And I know that's making it way too simple

00:08:50

but ultimately that's the approach

00:08:52

and then how you get to that point,

00:08:54

that's where things get really hard.

00:08:56

- All right, I'm looking forward to pulling the pin out.

00:09:01

So the other one I've got on this list

00:09:04

is looking into distraction blockers

00:09:06

for my Mac and my iPhone.

00:09:09

I did look into it.

00:09:10

The only one that seemed like it was anywhere remotely

00:09:13

worth my time was freedom, which people have talked about

00:09:17

but it's currently pulled off the iOS store.

00:09:19

Like it's off the app store right now.

00:09:21

- 'Cause you can't do that on iOS.

00:09:23

- Well, you can because other people do it

00:09:26

for different reasons.

00:09:28

They just have lumped freedom in on the people who abused

00:09:31

'cause they use a VPN to do it.

00:09:34

- Yep.

00:09:34

- And they, which works really well

00:09:37

but Apple lumped them in with some people

00:09:40

who were abusing VPNs on that

00:09:43

and it sounds like they're in the middle

00:09:47

of a big conversation with Apple trying to show

00:09:49

how they are different than the people that abuse it.

00:09:52

So.

00:09:52

- VPNs on iOS has always felt like a house of cards

00:09:55

that was waiting to be blown over in my opinion.

00:09:57

- Sure, yeah.

00:10:00

Though it's a pretty big deal

00:10:01

'cause I know some folks who,

00:10:03

like one of which is a police officer

00:10:06

and his company, like the department issue phone

00:10:10

has a VPN on it.

00:10:11

Like that, I know that that's a big deal to them.

00:10:15

So I know it's a thing that Apple supports to some extent

00:10:19

and is perfectly happy with.

00:10:22

I just think they have issues when other services

00:10:27

start using VPNs in order just to enable

00:10:31

like one off person, personal uses.

00:10:34

Like they're okay with it if it's a company

00:10:36

but if it's for personal use in any way,

00:10:38

it seems like that's where it starts to get a little dicey.

00:10:41

- Which makes sense from Apple's perspective too.

00:10:44

I mean.

00:10:45

- Yeah.

00:10:46

- You can kind of assume, I guess,

00:10:47

that freedom has been around for a while

00:10:49

and they have noble intentions

00:10:51

and it's not just some guy who's stealing information

00:10:53

and.

00:10:54

- Yeah.

00:10:55

- But it does open the door to that sort of thing.

00:10:57

And I do not envy the people on the App Review team.

00:11:00

You hear all the time about these things

00:11:02

that have just like snuck through

00:11:04

and then it takes them even half a day

00:11:06

to get rid of those things.

00:11:08

And I think they actually do a pretty good job

00:11:09

of getting them off the store as quickly as they do.

00:11:12

But by the time they get through,

00:11:14

Mac's stories is written about it

00:11:15

in a bunch of other places.

00:11:17

And now like there's this whole Bruhaha

00:11:20

in the Apple community,

00:11:21

but oh my gosh, Apple's App Store Review

00:11:24

is strict as they are.

00:11:25

How in the world did this get through?

00:11:28

So they're gonna err on the side of caution.

00:11:29

- Right, right.

00:11:31

Anyway, freedom was the one that I was looking at.

00:11:34

However, time, you know, into the day came around,

00:11:36

I just decided this is not a thing for me.

00:11:39

Like I just don't think distraction blockers

00:11:41

or a thing I need to put in place

00:11:44

because I started just paying attention to

00:11:47

like how much time do I goof off on my Mac

00:11:51

or my iPhone?

00:11:51

It's actually quite small.

00:11:54

So like every once in a while,

00:11:56

I'll goof off on YouTube for 15 minutes or so,

00:11:58

but I'm not one of those that tends to get lost

00:12:01

on it for an hour and a half.

00:12:02

That's not a thing I think I personally struggle with.

00:12:05

So I don't know.

00:12:06

- Check your screen time, it'll tell you for sure.

00:12:08

- My fun side note,

00:12:10

my screen time stats are completely worthless.

00:12:14

And I figured that out.

00:12:16

- Oh yeah, I think I heard you talk about this on whims.

00:12:19

- Yeah, it's okay.

00:12:21

So as I'm pulling it up right now,

00:12:23

just so I could see what I've got on it.

00:12:28

Yeah, so today, again,

00:12:30

it's just after one o'clock in the afternoon.

00:12:32

I have been on my phone for six and a half hours.

00:12:35

That's what this says.

00:12:37

Productivity apps on this are six hours and 23 minutes.

00:12:42

So it's like, why is that, Joe?

00:12:46

It's because I leave OmniFocus open all the time.

00:12:49

Like I use OmniFocus as a to-do list

00:12:52

and I tend to just leave it open on my phone

00:12:54

sitting on my desk or next to me almost all day long.

00:12:58

So yeah, it doesn't do a whole lot of good.

00:13:01

But it does tell me how much time I spend on the other stuff

00:13:04

as well.

00:13:05

So I have to drill down,

00:13:06

like I can't look at the big number

00:13:07

because it's completely distorted.

00:13:10

So I can drill down on it

00:13:13

and those numbers are pretty good.

00:13:15

Like I spend somewhere around 20, 30 minutes a day

00:13:18

on things other than OmniFocus,

00:13:20

which I feel like is pretty good.

00:13:22

So I don't know.

00:13:24

I don't know that this is a thing

00:13:26

that I need to continue pursuing.

00:13:27

It's a fun idea.

00:13:28

Sorry, Chris Bailey,

00:13:30

but this is not a thing I think I'm gonna spend

00:13:33

a whole lot of time focusing on and trying to figure out.

00:13:36

So I'm gonna just say done on that one.

00:13:39

- All right, fair enough.

00:13:41

I guess that leaves me

00:13:44

and I went back and listened to this

00:13:46

to make sure that I phrased this the way

00:13:49

that I thought I phrased it and I did.

00:13:51

So I'm gonna check this office completed

00:13:54

because I had said to consider the doors

00:13:58

and choose whether I wanted to close any of them.

00:14:03

Current state of affairs in the Mike Schmitt's world.

00:14:06

I'm not closing any doors yet,

00:14:08

but I do think this is a very healthy perspective

00:14:14

and I've got a couple of things kind of flagged

00:14:16

as keep an eye on this and see where it goes.

00:14:20

And it's quite possible that those things

00:14:22

three months from now are going to be doors

00:14:24

that will be closed.

00:14:25

The way I plan on implementing this long-term follow-up

00:14:29

would be when I do my personal retreats every couple months,

00:14:32

I ask myself those questions,

00:14:34

what should I start doing?

00:14:35

What should I stop doing?

00:14:36

What should I keep doing?

00:14:37

And I make myself choose something to stop doing.

00:14:39

I've basically got a couple of things

00:14:40

that are on the chopping block

00:14:42

for when I do my next personal retreat.

00:14:45

But no doors are closing as of this moment.

00:14:48

Fun side note, by the way,

00:14:52

if I could put in a selfless promotion plug here.

00:14:55

- I was hoping you would.

00:14:57

- Okay, we were talking before we hopped on here.

00:15:00

I have my video course,

00:15:02

Faith Based Productivity Available for Pre-Order.

00:15:04

And until the course is ready,

00:15:06

which should be about the beginning of the year,

00:15:08

I have like a 50% discount on that course

00:15:13

plus another course on how I do my personal retreats.

00:15:17

So if you want to get both of those courses,

00:15:21

plus a couple of coaching calls with me,

00:15:23

you can check that out at faithbasedproctivity.com.

00:15:25

It's 197 as opposed to 397 after the pre-order,

00:15:30

once the course is available for all of that stuff.

00:15:34

You can always get just the course at 197,

00:15:36

but kind of what I'm doing is for people

00:15:38

who want to support me in the development of this thing,

00:15:41

you jump in early and you get some free bonus stuff,

00:15:44

including the personal retreat stuff.

00:15:46

So that'll include not only the questions,

00:15:48

but also like the templates that I use,

00:15:50

the wheel of life, stuff like that.

00:15:51

So PDF resources that people can use as well.

00:15:54

Okay, I hate doing self promotion,

00:15:55

so exiting soapbox.

00:15:58

- Well, one of the questions I had for you,

00:16:02

'cause I'm not gonna let you get away from us that quick,

00:16:04

was you were going to this process of figuring out

00:16:08

which doors that you were gonna close,

00:16:10

but through that process,

00:16:11

did you look at doors that you needed to open?

00:16:14

And is this one of those?

00:16:15

'Cause I know that you've been talking about

00:16:17

this faith based productivity course

00:16:19

for at least with me,

00:16:21

you and I have been talking about it for a long time.

00:16:23

- Yeah.

00:16:24

- To some degree or another from, even from its,

00:16:27

wait, I had this really cool idea.

00:16:29

Even from that point, you and I have had discussions about it.

00:16:33

But was this something that didn't even enter into that?

00:16:36

Because it was already moving forward,

00:16:39

so it didn't even get considered as something to close,

00:16:41

or was it something that as part of this,

00:16:43

you realized you needed to open that door?

00:16:45

- You mean the door for faith based productivity specifically?

00:16:47

- Yes, yep.

00:16:49

This was one of the things that I always kept the option open

00:16:53

going back to predictably irrational,

00:16:56

where they wanted to keep all of the doors open.

00:16:58

That's kind of what I was doing with faith based productivity,

00:17:01

but I never gave it the time and attention

00:17:03

that it deserved for it to get off the ground.

00:17:06

And then when I found myself not working with Asian efficiency

00:17:11

anymore, I had the time to devote to this.

00:17:14

So I've been cranking on this thing.

00:17:15

I've been creating workbook content.

00:17:17

I have been doing everything,

00:17:19

basically accept the videos, those are out of my hands,

00:17:21

'cause my brother who's a really, really good video

00:17:24

and audio guy is helping me with that stuff.

00:17:27

So I'm basically trying to get everything else

00:17:29

that I need for the course done,

00:17:31

and then as the videos get done,

00:17:32

I'll release everything as it's available.

00:17:35

But I accidentally sold one the other day.

00:17:37

I say accidentally, 'cause I haven't announced it anywhere,

00:17:39

(laughs)

00:17:41

other than this podcast now.

00:17:42

But, and that is because there's nothing there

00:17:46

if you were to log into it right now.

00:17:48

So I didn't want someone to have a bad first experience.

00:17:51

Pay me 200 bucks for the course,

00:17:52

log in, see nothing there.

00:17:53

I didn't have any email sequences set up

00:17:55

for the coaching calls or anything.

00:17:57

My scheduler wasn't set up.

00:17:58

So all of a sudden I saw this name come in and I'm like,

00:18:01

oh crap. (laughs)

00:18:02

So I spent all Friday afternoon

00:18:04

trying to create something that I could give to somebody

00:18:08

who might purchase this thing.

00:18:09

So now the scheduler is there

00:18:11

and there's a welcome email that you get

00:18:13

and stuff like that.

00:18:13

So you can book the coaching calls right away.

00:18:17

And then the content, like I said,

00:18:18

is gonna be released as soon as it's available.

00:18:20

And then once it's all available,

00:18:22

then the pre-order deals is gonna go away.

00:18:25

And like I said, I think that'll be

00:18:26

about the beginning of the year.

00:18:27

- Sure.

00:18:28

- So long winded version of answering your question

00:18:30

that this was a door that I knew I needed

00:18:32

to walk through at some point.

00:18:34

And then state of circumstances being that what they are,

00:18:38

it's like, okay, now is the time to do this.

00:18:40

And I've gotten a lot of encouragement from people,

00:18:43

yourself, Sean Blank, David Sparks,

00:18:45

a lot of people I really respect who have encouraged me

00:18:48

that this actually could be successful.

00:18:51

I have had trouble believing that this could be big,

00:18:54

but I've had a couple of people who have encouraged me

00:18:56

and showed me helped shape or shift my perspective

00:19:00

on this thing.

00:19:01

So we're gonna give it a shot.

00:19:02

And yeah, it's available now.

00:19:05

Well, the pre-order is available now.

00:19:06

- Yeah, I'm excited about this.

00:19:08

I think it's gonna be fun.

00:19:09

I'm looking forward to it.

00:19:11

And I need to go through this too.

00:19:12

So yes, but it'll be fun.

00:19:15

Anyway, I'll let you move on from here.

00:19:19

So anyway, today's book,

00:19:21

I can tell that we're both a little excited about this one

00:19:23

because we keep trying to bring it up.

00:19:25

(laughing)

00:19:27

But I'll let you introduce it.

00:19:29

- Sure, this is Scrum,

00:19:30

the art of doing twice the work in half the time,

00:19:33

which is the most click-baity title I have ever heard.

00:19:35

- Exactly.

00:19:37

- By Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland,

00:19:40

which I think Jeff is the guy who's the co-creator

00:19:43

of Scrum and then JJ is his son.

00:19:45

So these guys definitely know what they're talking about.

00:19:49

I do wanna preface this book though,

00:19:52

'cause there's a lot of great stuff in here.

00:19:54

But did you happen to read any of the Amazon reviews

00:19:58

for this book?

00:19:59

- Yep.

00:20:00

- Okay.

00:20:01

So there's one in here.

00:20:04

Now I can't find it.

00:20:05

But there's one where they basically said,

00:20:09

if you believe Jeff Sutherland,

00:20:13

he's personally responsible for basically saving the world,

00:20:17

all these different things.

00:20:18

And that definitely comes through in the book,

00:20:23

but there is a lot of great information here.

00:20:24

So we're gonna save you the,

00:20:28

what's the word?

00:20:30

Like Jeff Sutherland thinks he's pretty great stuff

00:20:32

and he can save any company organization for anything.

00:20:36

So we're gonna save you all of that

00:20:37

and just tease out the valuable bits here from the book.

00:20:41

- That's the idea.

00:20:42

Yeah, Jeff is a very confident man.

00:20:45

- Yes.

00:20:46

- And you can pick that up very quickly.

00:20:48

Just as an example, he mentions how a lot of times

00:20:54

he'll talk about how, well, when I came up with Scrum

00:20:57

and he'll go into all the stuff about it,

00:21:01

but he's the co-creator.

00:21:04

If you didn't read that on the cover of the book,

00:21:09

you wouldn't know that someone else helped him

00:21:13

in the creation of that.

00:21:14

You wouldn't know that there's another co-creator

00:21:17

with Scrum.

00:21:19

So just reading the book, he claims 100% ownership of that

00:21:23

and believes that coming up with it

00:21:27

was the absolute best thing that's happened to humanity

00:21:30

since its inception.

00:21:31

So yes, I'm, (laughs)

00:21:34

we don't need to go into that anymore.

00:21:35

I'm sure it'll come up more when we get into

00:21:37

this whole rating process, but yeah,

00:21:39

it's definitely a thing to be aware of.

00:21:41

If you go read this, that will happen.

00:21:45

I just kind of ignored it after a while.

00:21:47

It's like, okay, here we go again.

00:21:48

- Yeah, it happens so much that you can tune it out

00:21:51

but half within the book.

00:21:52

- Yeah, you can.

00:21:53

- And I do wanna say, he does have a lot of notches

00:21:58

on his belt, so he probably is validated

00:22:01

in saying a lot of this stuff.

00:22:03

But talking about author style, I guess at the beginning,

00:22:08

it does get a little old.

00:22:11

And it's not as simple as we'll just implement Scrum

00:22:14

and everything is gonna change overnight,

00:22:16

which is kind of the narrative that's told over

00:22:19

and over and over again through all these different stories.

00:22:21

- Right.

00:22:22

- So anyways, jumping in here, chapter one.

00:22:25

- Yes.

00:22:26

- The way the world is broken.

00:22:29

And this chapter basically just outlines

00:22:33

how the traditional methods of project management don't work.

00:22:38

The key comparison here is the Scrum method,

00:22:42

which we're gonna unpack over the rest of this episode

00:22:45

and he impacts over the next, what is it, eight chapters

00:22:49

versus the traditional waterfall method.

00:22:52

- Yeah.

00:22:53

- And it's called the waterfall method.

00:22:55

I heard somebody describe it one time

00:22:56

because you pick a date and time in the future,

00:23:00

you pick your budget and then you move towards

00:23:04

the edge of the waterfall and hope you don't go over.

00:23:07

(laughs)

00:23:08

- I've never that, but that works.

00:23:10

- Yeah.

00:23:11

Problem with that is that they're based on these Gantt charts

00:23:15

and as he says on page five, the only problem

00:23:18

with Gantt charts is that they are always, always wrong.

00:23:21

And this is very true.

00:23:24

He's a couple examples in here, but I've heard of other

00:23:27

examples and other discussions of Scrum that I've read

00:23:31

over the years, like the Denver Airport, the Sydney Opera House,

00:23:35

where people said it's gonna take six months

00:23:37

and $10 million and then it takes six years and $200 million.

00:23:42

That's pretty common with this traditional

00:23:45

project management approach.

00:23:47

And so Scrum is a completely different way of working

00:23:51

where instead of picking a date for the project

00:23:54

to be complete, you're gonna work in these shorter periods

00:23:57

of time called sprints and you're going to select the things

00:24:00

that are gonna provide the greatest value

00:24:02

towards the project.

00:24:03

You're gonna crank on those at the end of the sprint,

00:24:04

whether it be one week, two weeks, three weeks,

00:24:06

four weeks, whatever.

00:24:08

You're gonna evaluate the work that you got done

00:24:11

and you're going to go through retrospectives

00:24:13

so that you can get better for the next time.

00:24:16

And there's a lot in that short description,

00:24:20

but is that a fair introduction to Scrum?

00:24:23

- Yeah, I would say so because both,

00:24:25

so Scrum is like a, I don't know how to explain that,

00:24:30

but Agile is the term that a lot of people tend to call it.

00:24:34

There are other versions of Agile out there.

00:24:37

Scrum is a specific within that.

00:24:39

- Yep.

00:24:41

- So Scrum and Agile are, they get their origins

00:24:45

in software development and waterfall is seen heavily,

00:24:50

like that's considered like a software development style.

00:24:54

That waterfall method, by the way,

00:24:55

he mentions that that was actually based off

00:24:58

of Trench Warfare from World War I in this first chapter,

00:25:02

which I thought was pretty crazy.

00:25:03

- Yeah, that's kind of a crazy idea.

00:25:05

I didn't really know that, but that's kind of interesting.

00:25:08

But yeah, Scrum and waterfall,

00:25:10

like they come out heavily in development,

00:25:12

which of course I work in.

00:25:14

So that means that these are things

00:25:16

that I live and breathe a lot.

00:25:19

So, you know, the waterfall method,

00:25:21

like the way I've always thought of it

00:25:23

is whenever you look at the gantt charts,

00:25:25

like you have a line at the top

00:25:26

and then it drops down to the next step

00:25:28

and then it goes across and it drops down to the next step.

00:25:30

Well, with waterfall, you go through a process of figuring out

00:25:35

all the details about what you need to do.

00:25:38

And then you spec out how long it's going to take

00:25:42

and how much it's going to cost.

00:25:44

Then you go through a process of building the entire product,

00:25:47

then you drop down into testing and bug fixing

00:25:50

and then you release it.

00:25:51

And it's all done single steps until the thing is released.

00:25:55

The problem is that you run into scenarios the whole time

00:25:58

with budget and how long it's going to take

00:26:00

because you don't, like the specs probably should change

00:26:04

as you go, but they don't because you've already done

00:26:07

all of the hard work of specking it up front.

00:26:10

So people throw a fit whenever you go to change it.

00:26:12

That's part of what he's getting at whenever he says

00:26:15

the way the world is broken.

00:26:16

- Yep, then it's project creep and all that other stuff.

00:26:19

- Yeah, it's like, oh, well, now that I see that,

00:26:22

it reminds me that we need these three features.

00:26:24

Well, that's not part of the spec,

00:26:25

so now we need to do a change request,

00:26:28

which adds all kinds of overhead and it drives up the cost.

00:26:31

So there's even shops that do who know this

00:26:35

that whenever they quote things,

00:26:37

they actually quote it as at a loss

00:26:39

because they know that if they win the bid,

00:26:41

there will be nothing but change requests

00:26:44

in order to get what they want

00:26:45

and that's where they make the money.

00:26:47

So 30 dogs.

00:26:48

That is a way that people do business.

00:26:51

It does exist.

00:26:52

Whereas I like to compare Waterfall to Scrum and Agile

00:26:56

by taking the waterfall method that you're used to,

00:27:00

each of those steps from beginning to end,

00:27:03

but you condense them down into like a one or two week period

00:27:07

and do that whole process a whole bunch of times

00:27:11

until you're done.

00:27:12

Like that's the way that I like to think of it.

00:27:14

That's a gross exaggeration of it, for sure,

00:27:16

especially if you read this book.

00:27:18

But again, you can tell, I know a lot about this

00:27:21

and I'm fairly passionate about it,

00:27:23

but it's because I work in web development.

00:27:26

So these styles are things I live and breathe.

00:27:29

So yes, which means I'm probably gonna be fairly lively today.

00:27:33

I apologize.

00:27:34

(laughing)

00:27:36

- No apologies needed.

00:27:37

I should also, I guess at the beginning here,

00:27:40

kind of reference my perspective

00:27:43

and experience with Scrum too,

00:27:45

because this is something that I had no experience with

00:27:47

before I started working with the Asian efficiency team.

00:27:50

But Asian efficiency is all in with Scrum

00:27:53

and people would look at me weird when I would tell them,

00:27:56

we use Gira at Asian efficiency because they're like,

00:27:58

"Isn't that for software development?

00:28:01

"You guys don't develop software."

00:28:03

But really it's just a Scrum tool basically.

00:28:07

And I say Scrum, maybe a better term would be Agile tool,

00:28:10

but I know you started using Gira and it's built for this.

00:28:14

So I learned a lot from working with the Asian efficiency team

00:28:18

and the way that they've implemented Scrum,

00:28:20

but there's lots of different ways that you can do this.

00:28:24

I do think that Asian efficiency's implementation

00:28:26

was pretty much to the book.

00:28:28

There's a couple areas where we did things

00:28:31

a little bit differently, which I'll point out

00:28:33

as we go through here, but it's not like I'm implementing Scrum

00:28:38

with a whole bunch of clients.

00:28:39

It's just been the way that the company

00:28:41

that I've been working with the last several years

00:28:43

has gotten things done.

00:28:44

And it's kind of ruined me, I have to say.

00:28:47

Scrum is so much better than the traditional

00:28:50

task management approach, especially when you're working

00:28:52

with a smaller team.

00:28:54

We'll get into chapter three is all about teams,

00:28:56

so we'll look into that in a minute.

00:28:58

- For sure.

00:28:59

- Yeah, so Scrum is Agile, but Agile's not necessarily Scrum.

00:29:03

I don't know exactly what the difference is.

00:29:06

I do know that Scrum is based off of the idea from Rugby,

00:29:09

where you huddle up and you get to the line

00:29:11

and then everybody has the Scrum.

00:29:13

And then when it's done, like you go back in your regroup.

00:29:16

So that's kind of where it got its name.

00:29:19

He does call out the four values of Agile

00:29:22

in this first chapter two, which are people over process,

00:29:25

products that actually work over documenting

00:29:27

what the product is supposed to do,

00:29:29

collaborating with customers over negotiating with them,

00:29:31

and then responding to change over following a plan.

00:29:35

So you can see right away, you were talking about how,

00:29:38

using the waterfall method, you send out the contract,

00:29:41

you maybe do it at a loss, because you know

00:29:43

there's going to be a bunch of change orders.

00:29:45

Like the Agile values are just turning that completely

00:29:48

on its head.

00:29:48

- Yeah, because essentially what you're trying to do

00:29:50

with Agile is get something in your end users' hands

00:29:54

as soon as you can to try getting feedback

00:29:57

as quickly as you can.

00:29:59

It's all about a feedback loop.

00:30:01

It's not about trying to turn out a product.

00:30:03

It's about iterating your way towards the correct answer

00:30:06

at the end of the day.

00:30:07

- Exactly.

00:30:08

And then a couple other key tenants here,

00:30:10

you know you want to figure out what's slowing your team down

00:30:12

and eliminate, you don't want to work more,

00:30:13

you want to work smarter.

00:30:15

- Yes.

00:30:15

- And then also in this section,

00:30:18

there's that joke about the chicken in the pig.

00:30:21

(laughs)

00:30:22

- Yep.

00:30:23

- And I do think that it fits here though.

00:30:25

So the joke goes that the chicken in the pig

00:30:28

are going to open up a restaurant,

00:30:30

and the pig says, "No way you're involved,

00:30:32

but I'd be committed."

00:30:33

And really what makes Scrum work

00:30:39

is people being committed to the process,

00:30:42

not just involved in it.

00:30:44

I've been in other places that have toyed around

00:30:48

with the idea of implementing Scrum,

00:30:50

like, "Oh, we'll just try it."

00:30:51

And at that point, you're involved with the process,

00:30:54

but unless you really commit to it,

00:30:56

it's really not going to work.

00:30:58

And it can't just be one person either,

00:30:59

it's got to be the team.

00:31:01

So we'll say that at the beginning here

00:31:03

before we dive into the specifics.

00:31:05

- Yeah, I know that,

00:31:08

I had a conversation because, you know,

00:31:11

this is what the, one of the fun parts about Bookworm

00:31:13

is you find yourself, at least I do,

00:31:15

I carry my book with me in a lot of places.

00:31:18

Well, I had this with me when I was at the church

00:31:22

doing some IT work on a Tuesday,

00:31:25

and one of the leaders of the church saw it,

00:31:30

and then it sparked a whole conversation.

00:31:33

And I don't know that it'll go anywhere,

00:31:35

but it was this conversation around,

00:31:37

could the church use Scrum as a way of just managing

00:31:42

all of the daily operations and everything that happens

00:31:45

throughout the week at the church?

00:31:47

- Yes, you could.

00:31:48

- It's like, "Well, yes, absolutely,

00:31:50

there are churches who do that."

00:31:52

So it was just kind of an interesting conversation

00:31:54

because, you know, the values that come behind it,

00:31:57

you could easily apply in a lot of places,

00:32:00

not just software development.

00:32:02

- Yep, absolutely.

00:32:03

And that's kind of my reference to Amazon Review

00:32:06

at the beginning, that was the reviewers' beef with the book,

00:32:08

was he's basically taking credit

00:32:10

for the successful implementation of this

00:32:13

and all these different arenas.

00:32:14

He's like, "Look what I did."

00:32:15

- Yeah.

00:32:17

- Well, no, you provided the framework,

00:32:19

but the other, the people actually did the work.

00:32:21

And he did, I mean, kudos to him for the framework,

00:32:25

or co- framework, I guess, 'cause he's the co-founder of Scrum.

00:32:29

- See, he's infected us.

00:32:30

We think it's him alone.

00:32:31

- Yeah, exactly, exactly.

00:32:34

But the hard work, the hard part is in implementing it.

00:32:37

I can tell you that.

00:32:39

In fact, in the next chapter,

00:32:40

the origins of Scrum, there's this Shuhari

00:32:43

that I put down here, these are the different levels of mastery.

00:32:46

So Shoe is the first level where you know all the rules

00:32:49

and the forms, and at that level of mastery,

00:32:52

you follow it to the letter of the law.

00:32:55

And then Ha is the middle one,

00:32:57

there you've mastered the forms

00:32:58

and you can start to make innovations.

00:33:00

You can start to change things for the way

00:33:01

that you wanna work.

00:33:02

And then Rhee is the top level where you're able

00:33:04

to discard the forms entirely

00:33:05

because you've mastered the practice.

00:33:07

And you're able to be creative all being unhindered.

00:33:10

It takes a while to get to that point.

00:33:13

And that is really where the magic happens

00:33:15

with the implementation of Scrum.

00:33:18

It takes a while for you to start,

00:33:21

for you to recognize what are the pieces

00:33:23

that you need to have these

00:33:24

and what are the places where you can kind of

00:33:26

bend the rules, so to speak.

00:33:28

And he doesn't get into all the details

00:33:31

of all the different situations that he worked at.

00:33:33

And I don't know how long the process was

00:33:35

before people went from shoe to how to re-

00:33:37

and then back again, 'cause there were several examples

00:33:39

where he said, "Okay, once they got what they needed

00:33:42

"and their feet were no longer held to the fire,

00:33:44

"they went back to doing things the old way."

00:33:46

Which is kind of ridiculous.

00:33:49

This works so well, we better stop.

00:33:51

(laughs)

00:33:52

But I guess my point I'm trying to make here

00:33:56

is that for the results to really happen,

00:34:01

you have to get to that top level.

00:34:03

And I kind of think that you can't work

00:34:05

with a consultant for six months and get there.

00:34:08

Even if you did bring in Jeff Sutherland

00:34:10

and as great as he is, I don't think he can get your team

00:34:13

there in that short a period of time.

00:34:15

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's just my gut feeling.

00:34:17

- Yeah, I think it'll take time.

00:34:19

It would take, I think at least a handful of months,

00:34:22

if not longer to fully get to the re-side of things.

00:34:26

Just because it's not simple.

00:34:28

It's hard to get to that level.

00:34:31

I know that for me having worked with a lot of clients

00:34:35

who are under agile principles

00:34:38

and even pro-course our company,

00:34:40

we've got it fully implemented at this point.

00:34:43

This is a thing that I'm very familiar with

00:34:45

and know all the details, but it's not a thing

00:34:49

that you're going to put in place

00:34:51

and then in a week, you know it's just second nature.

00:34:54

That's not the way it is.

00:34:56

It gives you a framework,

00:34:57

but I had a conversation with a friend of mine

00:35:01

who is in the process of considering implementing this

00:35:06

personally, which I think we're going to talk about

00:35:08

a little later and how you could do that.

00:35:10

But one note that he pointed out was that

00:35:14

agile running scrum personally

00:35:17

has a ton of flexibility with it.

00:35:19

Yes, there's a lot of structure to it,

00:35:21

but it's incredibly flexible as far as what you're doing

00:35:26

and how you go about doing it throughout the day.

00:35:28

So a lot of productivity frameworks at least

00:35:32

tend to try to lock you into certain structure,

00:35:36

which may or not be a good thing,

00:35:38

but when you get into scrum and really start implementing it,

00:35:43

it does come with a lot of ability to move around

00:35:46

and move quickly.

00:35:47

So that's the nice part about it.

00:35:49

Yeah, definitely.

00:35:50

I want to go back real quickly and mention

00:35:53

just on the topic of getting up to speed with this stuff.

00:35:57

I have a friend who is a certified scrum teacher

00:36:02

and he hosts these different workshops

00:36:07

for the different scrum roles.

00:36:09

So you can attend a workshop on being a scrum master,

00:36:14

a product owner, whatever,

00:36:16

and there's multiple levels for these all day workshops.

00:36:21

He actually, by the way, at the moment

00:36:23

is not hosting those workshops

00:36:25

because I believe he's working with Toyota in Texas.

00:36:29

So they mentioned Toyota as kind of like the birthplace

00:36:31

of a lot of this stuff in this book.

00:36:33

A lot of the ideas can be traced back to the Toyota way

00:36:36

and having anybody being able to stop the line

00:36:39

and fix the thing that's going wrong,

00:36:40

remove the impediments and then they're able to crank out

00:36:43

a lot more cars and a lot more higher quality,

00:36:46

a lot less errors by doing things that way.

00:36:49

So the fact that you can, as a person in a different role,

00:36:54

attend many of these different workshops,

00:36:58

these all day trainings, which will teach you the principles

00:37:01

that I think there's like three or four different levels.

00:37:05

Like that kind of tells me that there is a lot

00:37:08

to implement here and it's not the kind of thing

00:37:12

where like you attend it all day

00:37:13

and there's two things that you're gonna take away from there

00:37:15

and then you're gonna go implement that

00:37:17

and then you can come back the next day

00:37:18

and you can do the next level.

00:37:20

My understanding of this stuff and from talking to him,

00:37:22

I actually interviewed him for the Productivity Show.

00:37:24

I think it was episode 189.

00:37:26

His name is Judas Smith.

00:37:28

We can link to that in the show notes

00:37:30

that people wanna go back and listen to that episode

00:37:32

but there's just so much there

00:37:36

and I kind of think like there's a limit on the amount

00:37:39

of information that the human brain can take in,

00:37:42

synthesize and then put into action.

00:37:45

And then when you talk about having to do that

00:37:47

with everybody on the team,

00:37:49

like there is no way this is happening fast.

00:37:51

- Yeah, for sure.

00:37:53

Yeah, I mean, it seems like the more people you put in a room

00:37:56

trying to come up with solutions on things,

00:37:57

the less you get done.

00:37:59

- Right.

00:38:00

- To a point.

00:38:00

It just kind of seems that's the way it works.

00:38:03

So yes, that's where systems like this really come in helpful

00:38:08

but can be helpful because they give you a lot of the,

00:38:12

like the connecting points that are designed

00:38:16

to be incredibly efficient.

00:38:19

- Yep.

00:38:19

- So yeah, I know like one of, like when we do a pro course

00:38:23

and we do our sprint calls,

00:38:25

you know, we combine a handful of the meetings

00:38:28

that you're supposed to have with Scrum

00:38:32

and do them all at one time.

00:38:34

So, and there's some reasons for that.

00:38:36

Like again, if you know the whole system

00:38:38

and you know the intent of all the different steps,

00:38:40

you can break some of those rules.

00:38:42

- Yep.

00:38:43

- Which is what we do.

00:38:44

So, you know, that's, I am far from a person

00:38:48

who's gonna come in here and say,

00:38:49

"Yeah, you gotta do these three meetings

00:38:50

and you gotta do it this way."

00:38:52

Like, no, like I break a lot of those rules.

00:38:54

So.

00:38:55

- Right.

00:38:56

- Whoops.

00:38:57

Sorry, Jeff.

00:38:58

- A lot of the different meetings though

00:39:01

do come back to the same approach

00:39:04

which he introduces based on his experience

00:39:08

as an Air Force pilot.

00:39:10

So in the Air Force, they have training

00:39:11

on how to control risk

00:39:14

and there's four different things.

00:39:16

I think you pronounce this UDA, OODA.

00:39:19

The first O is observe, the second O is orient,

00:39:23

the D is decide and then the A is act.

00:39:27

And he matches that up with something

00:39:30

that a guy named Jay Edwards Deming introduced

00:39:33

called PDCA.

00:39:35

And this is plan do check and act.

00:39:38

And that really is the key idea behind

00:39:43

how to implement scrum.

00:39:44

So you can have your sprint meeting,

00:39:47

you can have a separate retrospective if you want,

00:39:49

but really this is the cycle that you wanna make sure

00:39:52

that you're hitting with your meeting cadence

00:39:55

is that you are planning the work that you are going to do.

00:39:59

You are doing the work, you're checking the work

00:40:01

and reviewing it to make sure that it's free from errors.

00:40:04

And then you are releasing it to the public.

00:40:07

You are getting it to customers

00:40:08

and then like you said, there's that feedback loop

00:40:10

that you're getting feedback and you know

00:40:13

what things to prioritize from the backlog

00:40:15

as you plan the next sprint.

00:40:17

That's really the important thing to implement.

00:40:20

- Yeah, when you were thinking about this,

00:40:22

did you consider GTD at all?

00:40:24

Like getting things done in the framework

00:40:26

and how that applies to this?

00:40:28

- No, I didn't.

00:40:29

- Okay, I couldn't help myself.

00:40:30

- My initial thoughts though,

00:40:32

and then it'll be interesting to hear you correct me,

00:40:35

is that GTD does not lend itself to this at all

00:40:39

because GTD, there is no deciding.

00:40:43

You're just following the tree

00:40:44

and putting the things in the right buckets.

00:40:46

And if it takes less than two minutes,

00:40:48

you're going to do it, which is why you may find yourself

00:40:51

just cranking through emails

00:40:52

because it's gonna take less than two minutes to do it.

00:40:54

It's automatically at the top of the backlog

00:40:56

and I don't think that's the right approach.

00:40:58

But yeah, so what am I missing?

00:41:01

- I think these two are perfectly complimentary

00:41:04

and it's because the levels at which they operate

00:41:10

are in my opinion perfectly aligned

00:41:13

because GTD helps me with getting things into the backlog,

00:41:18

the list of things that need to be done

00:41:21

and helping me create some form of a structure around it,

00:41:25

like making decisions about each of those items

00:41:28

and spelling them out in the detail that I need.

00:41:31

Like it helps me get those done,

00:41:32

but one of the places that I feel like people struggle with it

00:41:35

is the review process.

00:41:36

It's like, okay, well once a week,

00:41:38

I should sit down and review my system.

00:41:39

Well, that's where I think Scrum steps in

00:41:44

because you set up your week ahead of time

00:41:46

and we'll go into some of the details

00:41:48

of how this actually operates here.

00:41:50

But when you set up your sprint,

00:41:52

especially if you set it up with a one week sprint

00:41:55

and you're choosing all of the backlog items

00:41:58

that you're going to do within that week,

00:42:01

it's kind of like that's what you should be doing

00:42:04

with GTD anyway, but it's not spelled out at that level

00:42:07

because it doesn't operate at that level.

00:42:09

Like it's one level above that.

00:42:11

So I feel like with Scrum,

00:42:12

it gives you the framework that you need to operate

00:42:15

at the weekly level or the every two week level,

00:42:18

the biweekly level, it gives you some of that

00:42:21

and gives you the check-ins and such

00:42:23

to keep you moving in the right direction,

00:42:25

but it also helps you keep from overloading yourself.

00:42:28

So that's where I feel like Scrum steps in.

00:42:30

So to me, I feel like they fit each other perfectly,

00:42:33

but I can also see how people would look at it

00:42:35

and say, "Well, that doesn't actually add up.

00:42:38

"I'm sure it breaks down in some places,

00:42:40

"but I'm not one that's going to get caught up in details."

00:42:42

So for me, the way that I've currently got

00:42:46

some of my pieces spelled out,

00:42:48

they work in conjunction with each other

00:42:51

and it's pretty nice, not going to lie.

00:42:53

I like it.

00:42:55

So yes, I like the two together.

00:42:57

- I'll worry about the details for you.

00:42:59

- Okay, go for it.

00:43:00

You go for the details.

00:43:01

I'll be over here getting things done

00:43:03

while you worry about getting things done.

00:43:05

- Okay, so the basic tenant of getting things done,

00:43:09

you've got that flowchart, which is pretty famous, right?

00:43:12

And you've got the things that are in your inbox.

00:43:15

And then as you go through the checklist,

00:43:20

as you move it through the funnel,

00:43:23

at some point you have to decide

00:43:25

whether you want to put this thing off to the future,

00:43:27

which if you're going to be doing that alone

00:43:30

and you take out the two-minute rule piece of this,

00:43:33

then maybe I could see how this applies.

00:43:35

But if it takes less than two minutes, you're supposed to do it.

00:43:38

That rule right there shows me

00:43:41

that GTD is built on the concept of efficiency, okay?

00:43:46

Where I think SCRUM is built on the concept of effectiveness.

00:43:51

So GTD would tell you whatever you're looking at

00:43:55

at that particular moment,

00:43:56

if it takes less than two minutes to do,

00:43:58

that's the thing that you should be doing right now.

00:44:00

That's the thing you should be doing first.

00:44:02

But SCRUM is going to say,

00:44:04

what will bring the most value to the project

00:44:07

and do that first?

00:44:09

And so I think if you follow GTD to the letter of the law,

00:44:13

then you will find yourself in a position

00:44:15

where GTD is telling you to do one thing

00:44:17

because it's the most efficient way of cranking

00:44:20

through the things that you have to do.

00:44:21

And that can be at odds with the letter of the law for SCRUM.

00:44:25

So not saying you can't reconcile those two,

00:44:28

but that's my issue with GTD.

00:44:31

Is that fundamentally, I think it is based on

00:44:34

getting through things as quickly as possible

00:44:36

without even considering whether these

00:44:38

are the right things to be doing.

00:44:39

Now there is a part of that GTD tree

00:44:41

where if it's something you don't need, then you delete it.

00:44:44

But what if it's something that you might need?

00:44:45

You're going to put it in your reference file.

00:44:47

You're going to put it in your task manager.

00:44:48

You're going to make a decision about it

00:44:49

at some future point in time.

00:44:51

So the fact that you can't make a decision on this thing

00:44:56

isn't the right thing for right now

00:44:59

without sending it to another place

00:45:01

and then making a judgment on it

00:45:02

when context with all the other things that you have to do.

00:45:05

That's the thing that I think makes GTD

00:45:09

not so great from an effectiveness standpoint.

00:45:11

And I'm not doing a great job of explaining this,

00:45:13

but I will say that when you're implementing SCRUM,

00:45:16

it's very clear what the thing of most value is.

00:45:21

And so when you get something that shows up in front of you

00:45:25

and it's not in alignment with the thing

00:45:27

that's going to provide the most value,

00:45:29

it's a lot easier to say,

00:45:30

oh yeah, I'm not going to worry about that right now.

00:45:33

I think that's a big piece to me being able to say,

00:45:35

yeah, I'm just going to suck at email.

00:45:38

I know that email is not going to be in alignment

00:45:40

with the thing that is the most important.

00:45:42

Now, your situation's a little bit different,

00:45:45

so it's a little bit harder to separate those things.

00:45:48

But do you get what I'm saying?

00:45:50

I think GTD is if you were to just follow it as a system,

00:45:53

like you mentioned, the productivity frameworks.

00:45:54

And this is why I'm kind of done with frameworks

00:45:58

because people will say, this is the way to do it.

00:46:01

All you got to do is follow these five steps.

00:46:04

My gap book, for the last time,

00:46:05

I just sent out the book notes

00:46:07

via the newsletter for your best year ever.

00:46:09

Five different sections.

00:46:11

And each one of those sections is broken down into,

00:46:13

sections broken down to three different chapters.

00:46:15

It's such a framework.

00:46:17

And it's like, just do this, then this, then this, then this.

00:46:19

And it's never that simple.

00:46:21

But I do think that SCRUM does a better job than pretty much

00:46:27

any other framework I've seen of keeping the main thing

00:46:30

the main thing.

00:46:31

Because you constantly have to be asking that question,

00:46:33

especially if you're a product owner,

00:46:35

is what are the things that are really going to provide

00:46:37

the 80% of value for the 20% of the effort?

00:46:40

And then even taking that a step further,

00:46:41

there's a whole concept of like the minimum viable product,

00:46:44

the MVP, where what's the quickest thing we can get done

00:46:47

and move it out the door?

00:46:49

When you view your tasks through that lens,

00:46:51

it's a game changer.

00:46:52

- So there's a fundamental element of this

00:46:55

that I think completely changes everything you just said.

00:46:59

(laughs)

00:47:00

And that is time.

00:47:03

And especially in my case,

00:47:06

I operate off of, it's not a matter of,

00:47:10

I'm going to work on everything that comes in.

00:47:13

That's not the case.

00:47:14

I delete a lot of email that I never touch.

00:47:17

That's not the way that operates.

00:47:19

I set a time limit on it, because I know that it's not,

00:47:23

like it involves client communications,

00:47:26

which is super high value for me.

00:47:28

Like that is a fundamental, this has to get done

00:47:31

or the business does not operate.

00:47:33

Like that's what email is to me.

00:47:37

So I know that me processing my inbox

00:47:41

or leaving things in my inbox to work on later,

00:47:44

you know, that is something that,

00:47:47

you know, it's easy for me to say that is high value.

00:47:50

Like that is just inherently the way it is.

00:47:52

Not all of it, you know, there are pieces that come in.

00:47:55

Like that is junk, that does not need to be here.

00:47:57

This is, and granted, whenever I give out my email numbers,

00:48:00

that's post all the filters.

00:48:01

Like that's getting all the newsletters

00:48:03

and all the other stuff out of my inbox.

00:48:05

It's things that are sent directly to me

00:48:07

that I need to respond to.

00:48:08

Those are the numbers I tend to share.

00:48:10

So, you know, when I'm going through that,

00:48:12

those are things that, number one,

00:48:14

I'm setting a time limit on it.

00:48:16

It's usually 30, 40 minutes somewhere in there

00:48:18

that I'll spend on it two or three times a day.

00:48:21

Whenever I'm processing that.

00:48:23

And when I'm not on that,

00:48:27

that's when I'm operating on, say, in this case,

00:48:30

it would be Scrum.

00:48:31

Like I'm operating off of the boards for the company

00:48:35

such that I'm processing and working on client projects

00:48:38

or working on the long-term strategic pieces

00:48:41

because we've spelled out what we're doing over the week

00:48:45

and pulling in pieces that help do some

00:48:47

of our long-term strategic goals

00:48:49

versus some of our short-term.

00:48:52

We just got to get this done sort of thing.

00:48:53

Like we're able to break that out.

00:48:55

That's where I think Scrum helps out quite a bit.

00:48:58

But as far as like the GTD, you know,

00:49:00

processing inboxes, yeah,

00:49:02

sometimes it goes into the backlog.

00:49:04

Sometimes it gets done right away.

00:49:06

For me, like, yes, there's an efficiency stance of,

00:49:09

should I be doing this right now?

00:49:10

If the answer is no, then it's probably gonna hit

00:49:13

a list that I'll get to at some point.

00:49:17

If I can do it in two minutes or less,

00:49:19

usually my brain immediately makes the jump

00:49:21

of should you do it at all before I just do it,

00:49:24

even though it's, you know, say a minute task,

00:49:27

like, should you do it at all?

00:49:28

Like, that's usually where my head goes.

00:49:30

So this is why I say I don't think that I get too caught up

00:49:34

on all the, like, should you process it that way or not?

00:49:38

Should you spend your time trying to be as efficient as you can?

00:49:41

I don't know.

00:49:42

I'm just trying to make sure that I'm accomplishing

00:49:43

the things that are the most important.

00:49:45

Like, that's what I'm working on.

00:49:47

So does email fit that?

00:49:50

I don't know.

00:49:51

I just know that it's a thing that keeps the business running

00:49:53

and I can get it done and leaving things in the inbox,

00:49:58

although that doesn't follow any of the canons

00:50:00

of any productivity system that I know of.

00:50:03

Like, yeah, it breaks a lot of rules,

00:50:06

but things get done.

00:50:07

That's the important part.

00:50:09

- Things get done, yeah.

00:50:11

I agree with you, but I think if you were to look at it

00:50:14

through a measurement lens of how much are we getting done?

00:50:18

- Sure.

00:50:19

- You're cutting out an essential piece of Scrum.

00:50:23

And we just said that you can choose once you've mastered it

00:50:25

what you're gonna keep, what you're gonna get rid of.

00:50:28

This is the one piece I would argue

00:50:30

that you can never get rid of.

00:50:32

And that is when you don't send the email tasks

00:50:36

to any sort of system, whether it's omni-focused,

00:50:38

Giro, whatever, and sending emails to Giro

00:50:40

is completely ridiculous, but I throw it out there

00:50:42

just as an example.

00:50:43

- I think people do it.

00:50:44

- That you have to have, 'cause you made the argument,

00:50:47

so I'm gonna pick on you a little bit,

00:50:49

that these are gonna keep the lights on

00:50:51

for the business, they're gonna add value to the business.

00:50:53

Okay, so that's great.

00:50:55

We're gonna assume that's true.

00:50:57

Then how much value is that adding

00:51:00

and how many story points are we assigning to those

00:51:03

because the time that you are spending responding to email,

00:51:06

whether it's in the most efficient way possible or not,

00:51:10

that is taking away effort

00:51:13

that you can be spent moving the team's scrum goals

00:51:17

forwards, whether the team is team Buleg or team Procourse.

00:51:21

You give it what I'm saying?

00:51:22

So the fact that they never go to any sort of backlog,

00:51:26

they just go to the inbox and then I gotta get my inbox to zero,

00:51:29

you're removing the backlog grooming piece up from that

00:51:33

and you're basically at that point making the assumption

00:51:37

that all of these things are worthwhile.

00:51:39

Everything that you at least leave in your inbox

00:51:41

after all the rules and deleting things and whatever.

00:51:45

And I would challenge the notion that everything

00:51:50

that you leave in your email to do list

00:51:53

is actually something that should have action taken on it.

00:51:57

Let me give you an example.

00:51:58

I have kept emails in my email inbox before

00:52:03

and what I have found is that if I keep emails in my inbox,

00:52:07

I will put them off long enough

00:52:09

until the point passes when it's no longer important.

00:52:12

Okay, and at that point, does something bad happen?

00:52:16

Maybe, but a lot of times in the moment,

00:52:19

you're like, oh, I have to get back to this person.

00:52:22

And then when you don't get back to that person,

00:52:23

they're like, oh, nothing bad really happened there.

00:52:27

Now when you're working with clients,

00:52:28

it's a little bit different,

00:52:29

but maybe not as different as you think.

00:52:32

Like maybe the assumptions that we apply to this

00:52:35

are a little bit skewed where the customer is not always right.

00:52:39

And Scrum is saying that the customer is right.

00:52:42

So, and I know I'm making like contradictory statements here,

00:52:45

but my point is still the same,

00:52:47

that we want the customers to influence the work,

00:52:49

but we don't want to have them just pile up a big list

00:52:51

of things that we have to do.

00:52:53

You know, it's Steve Jobs at Apple's

00:52:55

probably the most famous example of saying

00:52:57

the customer doesn't know what they want.

00:52:59

Doesn't mean that they don't get feedback from customers,

00:53:01

but you don't just build what the customer is asking for either.

00:53:06

You have to dig deeper and figure out

00:53:08

what is the real problem they're trying to solve

00:53:10

by saying that they want this thing.

00:53:12

What was it, Henry Ford saying that if I,

00:53:15

we've given the customers what they want,

00:53:16

we'd be driving faster horses.

00:53:19

- Yeah.

00:53:20

- So there's a balancing act there for sure.

00:53:23

- Yeah, I also know that, you know,

00:53:25

sometimes we do build things that I think shouldn't be built.

00:53:29

Because we've argued over it,

00:53:31

they're still willing to pay for it.

00:53:34

And I make sure we set up the structure of the project

00:53:37

such that every time we have adjustments

00:53:39

or every time they ask for something,

00:53:41

it adds to the amount of time we put towards it,

00:53:43

which means their bill goes up.

00:53:44

This is why, you know, if my projects are structured that way,

00:53:50

whenever I'm responding to email,

00:53:54

it's giving me things that then can go on our backlog,

00:53:57

which then equates to billable hours and such

00:54:01

so that the company can continue to grow.

00:54:04

So--

00:54:05

- Yeah, so the billable hours thing,

00:54:07

that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

00:54:08

Let's go there for a minute.

00:54:09

(laughs)

00:54:11

- Which is tricky because, okay, let me clarify this

00:54:14

because we do something,

00:54:16

I'm not sure I've run across this

00:54:18

in any other software development company.

00:54:21

Are you familiar with how mechanic hours are built?

00:54:24

Like if you take your car to the shop?

00:54:25

- No.

00:54:26

- You have a book that tells them

00:54:29

how many hours a certain task takes,

00:54:33

whether it's changing the oil

00:54:35

or putting new brake pads on your car.

00:54:37

They have a number of hours

00:54:39

that they charge for those tasks

00:54:41

and it's up to the mechanic to either hit that

00:54:43

or do better than that.

00:54:45

We've been adopting that same process

00:54:49

for our web development.

00:54:51

So if you ask us to do, you know,

00:54:53

a certain type of integration between two websites,

00:54:55

we would tell you that's 15 hours worth of work

00:54:59

and we bill it based on 15 hours.

00:55:01

But if we've done it before,

00:55:02

we know that we probably actually only have maybe

00:55:05

three or four hours worth of our actual time involved in it,

00:55:09

but the value of it is 15 hours.

00:55:11

So we would bill based on 15 hours,

00:55:14

even though it took us four.

00:55:16

Does that make sense?

00:55:16

That's how we tend to do that.

00:55:19

Because it's value pricing, it's not time pricing.

00:55:22

So I just wanna clarify that.

00:55:23

Yeah, I know that makes sense.

00:55:25

So let's assume that email is what keeps the lights on

00:55:31

because customers request things via email.

00:55:35

You can send out the quotes for the website integration

00:55:38

for 15 hours.

00:55:40

They say, okay, and then the team finishes it in four hours

00:55:43

and you make X% because you finished it and had a schedule.

00:55:48

There's an example later in the book

00:55:51

of a company that does software development

00:55:54

and they do this 10 million, 12 month project.

00:55:58

I think those were the numbers.

00:56:00

And they say, we're gonna do this via Scrum.

00:56:03

And at any point, if you decide that that's good enough,

00:56:06

just pay us 20% on the remaining amount

00:56:09

and you can have the software in its current state.

00:56:13

So what happened is that they MVPed it

00:56:16

and they reviewed it after one month.

00:56:18

The customer wanted some changes.

00:56:19

They MVPed it again.

00:56:21

And then after three months,

00:56:22

the customer decided that this was good enough

00:56:24

and they walked away.

00:56:25

So they got their software project,

00:56:27

which was initially gonna be done in 12 months

00:56:30

for something like 3.2 million instead of 10 million.

00:56:34

And he was describing how this is actually

00:56:35

a win-win scenario because it means

00:56:39

that the software development firm now has nine months

00:56:42

that they can work on another project

00:56:43

and the percentage markup, whatever,

00:56:47

because of that clause at the end

00:56:48

where they get the 20% at the end,

00:56:51

it caused it to go from 15% profit to 60% profit.

00:56:56

That is very, very different than

00:56:58

how many hours can we bill out?

00:57:00

Which is the traditional way that most people view this.

00:57:03

And you're probably not going to,

00:57:05

and I'm not arguing that you should,

00:57:07

change the Pro-Course model to what that company did.

00:57:11

But I think it's a really interesting example.

00:57:14

And I also think that it highlights something

00:57:18

what was that, the seven habits of highly affected people

00:57:20

where they talk about think win-win.

00:57:22

Like a lot, especially with client work,

00:57:25

I think the tendency can be to,

00:57:29

a client work, especially if you're billing by the hour,

00:57:32

you're kind of at odds with the client

00:57:33

because the client wants it to get done

00:57:35

as quickly as possible so they don't pay as much.

00:57:39

And you want to be able to bill as much as you possibly can.

00:57:42

So you're working against each other, which,

00:57:45

I don't know, there's different approaches

00:57:47

to how to do that.

00:57:48

Sean McKeib of seanwes.com,

00:57:51

he in his book Overlap talks about this.

00:57:54

And the whole idea of value-based pricing,

00:57:56

where you're going to get a percentage

00:57:57

of what the final product is worth to the customer.

00:58:02

But the basic idea there is that we want that

00:58:05

from a company perspective or an independent contractor

00:58:08

perspective is I want to be able to make the most money

00:58:10

I can from this job.

00:58:12

And that's kind of different from Scrum,

00:58:15

but it also requires that you be okay

00:58:18

with not knowing what the next thing in the hopper

00:58:20

is going to be.

00:58:21

When I read that story, I thought,

00:58:22

well, that's great, assuming that you've got

00:58:24

another $10 million project that you can say yes to.

00:58:27

- Correct, correct.

00:58:28

- So not confessing to have all the answers,

00:58:30

but I did like that.

00:58:31

I did like that approach to it.

00:58:32

- Yeah, and it was one that I definitely,

00:58:35

I've been having conversations with.

00:58:37

I've got a, I've since hired a guy

00:58:40

as a business development manager,

00:58:42

so he's been doing a lot of the sales.

00:58:43

So part of my getaway from email strategy

00:58:47

is to let someone else do it.

00:58:49

And I won't be dealing with it over time.

00:58:53

So I'm in the middle of that transition right now.

00:58:55

So there's that point.

00:58:57

But the other thing that's involved here is one,

00:58:59

I really love that whole 20% clause.

00:59:02

'Cause in order for that to work,

00:59:03

they have to be paying you monthly.

00:59:05

So if it's a $10 million project,

00:59:07

they're paying you, what's the math workout to?

00:59:09

$800,000 a month or so.

00:59:11

And they're submitting that payment to you every month.

00:59:16

Well, then whatever's remaining on that balance,

00:59:19

they would pay you 20% of whatever's left.

00:59:21

At whatever point they decide to say, we're done.

00:59:25

And take the product and walk away from it.

00:59:27

Like that works, but you have to have bigger projects for it.

00:59:31

Like you can't do that on a project that takes two weeks.

00:59:34

And we do a lot of projects that are two weeks long.

00:59:37

So it's a thing where for us,

00:59:39

the speed of something like agile and scrum

00:59:43

is extremely beneficial.

00:59:45

But if we do longer term projects,

00:59:47

and we have quoted a couple recently,

00:59:50

that would be like four to six month long engagements.

00:59:54

And we've been trying to work out,

00:59:55

I was like, okay, say this is,

00:59:57

I don't even know what the numbers are,

00:59:58

but say it's a $10,000 project.

01:00:01

If we're gonna do that $10,000 project

01:00:03

over the next six months,

01:00:05

whatever that math works out to,

01:00:08

we could say, if at any point we get to where we could say,

01:00:10

we're done, then pay us 20% of whatever's left,

01:00:14

and we'll both walk away.

01:00:15

We could do that.

01:00:16

So we've been exploring that concept

01:00:18

because I really love that story.

01:00:19

I thought it was very interesting.

01:00:21

- I like the story.

01:00:22

My issue with the story though,

01:00:24

is that you have to be good at both then.

01:00:26

You have to be good at estimating waterfall,

01:00:28

and you have to be good at executing scrum.

01:00:30

I have not met a company that's been able to do both of them.

01:00:33

- Yep, yeah, it's hard.

01:00:34

Yeah, that was the first thing that we struggled with

01:00:36

on those when we were trying to figure out how to quote it,

01:00:38

was 'cause you have to go through a whole thing

01:00:41

of nailing down how much is involved in this,

01:00:44

and you have to get a list of the things

01:00:45

that they want done up front,

01:00:47

and that's not simple.

01:00:49

Like that was the hard part,

01:00:51

and that's part of why we started considering

01:00:53

this whole mechanics hours thing,

01:00:56

because like their tasks that we get asked to do

01:00:59

often enough that we have built templates internally

01:01:02

for our own use to make it quicker,

01:01:05

but we price by value.

01:01:07

We don't price based on how much time we put into it.

01:01:10

So our ROI is quite a bit higher because of that,

01:01:15

but it also means that it's hard to get the quote

01:01:21

to the client when I can say,

01:01:23

we're gonna do this four week project

01:01:26

and release it to you in two days.

01:01:27

- Right, yeah.

01:01:28

- 'Cause we could.

01:01:30

We could do that, technically speaking,

01:01:34

but the math to them doesn't add up,

01:01:37

but it's because we value price.

01:01:39

So it gets kinda complicated.

01:01:40

Anyway, we spent a long time on this,

01:01:42

but there are a lot of ways that you can come out this.

01:01:46

You can argue me on the email thing, I think,

01:01:48

'til we're both blue in the face.

01:01:50

- No, I feel a lot better now,

01:01:51

as you said, that you're looking for ways

01:01:53

to offload the email.

01:01:54

- Yeah, and I already have.

01:01:56

- I mean, that's a whole 'nother discussion,

01:01:57

but it comes back to are the things

01:01:59

that you're doing really the things that only you can do.

01:02:02

So there's the things that only you can do.

01:02:05

There's the things that you're the best at,

01:02:07

and those are the ones that kind of,

01:02:10

that's the ground where everybody kind of justifies

01:02:13

not delegating it to somebody else.

01:02:15

It's like nobody cares about this as much as I do

01:02:17

or no one can do it as well as I can.

01:02:18

- Yeah.

01:02:19

- But that's not true.

01:02:21

It's never true, but it's a limiting belief

01:02:24

that needs to be crushed, and I've dealt with that myself.

01:02:26

- Fun times.

01:02:27

I don't even know where we're at on our outline now.

01:02:29

We just completely threw it out.

01:02:30

- Yeah, let's go to teams.

01:02:31

- Okay.

01:02:32

- Chapter three.

01:02:33

So there's a couple things I wanna call out here.

01:02:36

The first one is fundamental attribution error.

01:02:40

And this is an important idea, not just for scrum teams,

01:02:42

but any team.

01:02:43

The idea behind this is that when you are blaming others,

01:02:47

you find fault with them personally.

01:02:49

This kind of comes back to the idea

01:02:51

that we judge others by their actions,

01:02:55

but ourselves by our intentions.

01:02:57

Okay, so when you apply that to teams

01:02:59

and somebody screws up,

01:03:00

you think that they did it on purpose.

01:03:02

(laughs)

01:03:03

All right, now when you are blamed,

01:03:05

you notice the situational factors

01:03:07

that led to the problem.

01:03:09

Okay, so that means that if Joe and I

01:03:10

are working on a scrum team,

01:03:12

Joe's supposed to ship something,

01:03:14

and he doesn't do it, I view it as Joe's a lazy bum,

01:03:18

Joe views it as well, I had all these health issues

01:03:20

and all these other things popped up,

01:03:21

and I just couldn't get it done.

01:03:23

And I don't even look at those things.

01:03:24

Is that a fair summary of this?

01:03:27

- Yeah, I would say so.

01:03:28

You know, it's hard for teams to come at things

01:03:33

and know who's at fault or who's in charge.

01:03:37

Like it's just a hard thing.

01:03:38

- Yeah, and see, that's the thing.

01:03:40

You don't wanna assign fault,

01:03:42

because instead of looking for blame and fault,

01:03:44

he says on page 65,

01:03:45

scrum rewards positive behavior

01:03:47

of focusing people on working together

01:03:49

and getting things done.

01:03:51

So he makes the point that we're all creatures

01:03:53

of the systems that we find ourselves in

01:03:54

and in business specifically,

01:03:56

we tend to blame people, not systems

01:03:58

when we should be looking at the ways

01:03:59

that we can fix the systems that the people are in.

01:04:02

- Yes, I'm not gonna argue that,

01:04:04

but I'm just saying that teams have a hard time

01:04:06

deciding a name to put on things.

01:04:10

- Yep.

01:04:11

- And that's a lot of what he's getting at here.

01:04:13

And there's a lot of,

01:04:16

like when you put together,

01:04:18

I'm jumping ahead of her a little bit,

01:04:20

but when you put together a sprint inside a scrum,

01:04:23

depending on the way you set your team up,

01:04:25

you're not actually assigning any of the stories

01:04:27

or the tasks to anyone.

01:04:29

- Correct.

01:04:30

- Because everyone should be fully independent

01:04:32

and everybody should be able to do everything

01:04:34

that's on that list.

01:04:36

So if you set that up in that way,

01:04:39

there is no attribution happening.

01:04:42

Like it's all about the team accomplishing something

01:04:45

to collectively, it's not individuals doing something.

01:04:48

- Correct.

01:04:49

I will push back a little bit on one thing you said there,

01:04:51

which is that the things in the backlog anybody can do,

01:04:54

that's kind of what we were pushing for

01:04:56

at Asian efficiency is that we have the skills matrix

01:04:59

and everybody has at least a base level skill

01:05:02

in entrepreneur whatever other systems

01:05:04

that happen to be there.

01:05:06

But in this chapter, he talks about the characteristics

01:05:08

of the best teams in the world.

01:05:09

Number one, they're transcended,

01:05:11

so they have a sense of purpose beyond the ordinary.

01:05:12

They know why they're doing what they're doing.

01:05:14

Number two, they're autonomous,

01:05:15

they're self-organizing, they're self-managing.

01:05:18

Number three, they're cross-functional.

01:05:19

This is the one I want to unpack a little bit.

01:05:21

Cross-functional means that you have all the skills

01:05:23

to complete the project on the team,

01:05:26

not on the individuals.

01:05:29

So that means that if you are a part

01:05:32

of a web development team, you've got a coder

01:05:35

and you've got a designer.

01:05:37

Doesn't mean that the coder can design.

01:05:39

And I think that that's an important skill

01:05:41

because, or an important distinction,

01:05:43

because if you are focusing on getting everybody

01:05:46

the skills that they need to do,

01:05:47

whatever might need to be done,

01:05:49

you are neutering people's unique ability.

01:05:52

And unique ability, that's one of my gap books

01:05:55

I read a while back.

01:05:56

The idea there is find the thing that only you can do.

01:06:00

And I really believe that if you got a bunch of people

01:06:03

who were functioning in their unique abilities

01:06:05

and they were all complimentary,

01:06:06

and they were on the same Scrum team

01:06:08

and they were using this to work on a project,

01:06:11

man, they could get twice the work done

01:06:14

in half the time for sure.

01:06:15

- Yeah, or if you've got enough work going on

01:06:17

and you've got two or three people

01:06:19

that can do the same thing,

01:06:21

then you can accelerate a certain area.

01:06:23

The trick with us is that we are a web development company,

01:06:27

but we're a development company.

01:06:30

We don't design.

01:06:32

The designs are given to us.

01:06:34

So we don't have a need for that side of it,

01:06:37

but we do have people who specialize in servers

01:06:40

versus front-end code.

01:06:42

Like we do that sort of thing.

01:06:44

And definitely those two can complement each other.

01:06:48

The trick there is that it is possible

01:06:51

for those team members to switch roles.

01:06:54

They wouldn't be as good at it,

01:06:57

but they can in a pinch work on those opposite sides.

01:07:00

Like to me, that's important,

01:07:02

that you can do that if you absolutely need to

01:07:04

because what that gives you is the ability

01:07:06

to understand what the other people are doing.

01:07:10

Do I know how to design?

01:07:11

Like do the actual technical design on a website?

01:07:15

Yeah, I know how to do it.

01:07:17

And I know when a site feels like it's designed well,

01:07:20

I've looked at enough designs

01:07:21

that I could put together a decent design.

01:07:23

Could I do that in the same timeframe

01:07:26

as a legit graphic designer?

01:07:28

Absolutely not.

01:07:29

Could I do it as well as they do?

01:07:30

Absolutely not.

01:07:31

Like that is how that tends to,

01:07:33

and I think that's what you're getting at is

01:07:35

you want people who have the expertise

01:07:37

in those different areas so that they can work together.

01:07:40

- Yeah, so I think the best case scenario is like you said,

01:07:44

if somebody who is your designer can't get the work done,

01:07:48

somebody else has some level of skill

01:07:50

they can jump in and they can move things forward.

01:07:52

That's great. - Correct.

01:07:54

- But I'm arguing that that's not

01:07:55

what cross-functional necessarily means

01:07:57

because this is something I've heard be thrown out

01:08:00

a bunch of times and we need to be a cross-functional team.

01:08:03

Everyone's gotta be able to do everything.

01:08:04

And I think to myself, what a waste of time

01:08:07

trying to get everybody up to the same level.

01:08:11

Okay, so everybody's gonna be mediocre at everything.

01:08:13

Like that's not what we should be shooting for.

01:08:16

We should let people function in their unique ability

01:08:21

the things that they are really good at.

01:08:23

And just as an example, you know that saying

01:08:25

that opposites attract with relationships.

01:08:28

If my wife and I have the same strengths

01:08:31

and the same weaknesses, it diminishes the,

01:08:36

what's the word I'm looking for?

01:08:40

The notability, the potential, I guess, for the family.

01:08:45

I interviewed at one point on the productivity show

01:08:49

David Colby, the guy behind the Colby test.

01:08:51

Well, actually, Kathy Colby is the one behind it.

01:08:53

He's the CEO of the company though.

01:08:55

And the whole idea there is like the conative strengths

01:08:57

and there's lots of different assessments like that.

01:09:00

And we used that at Asian efficiency

01:09:01

because we wanted to recognize

01:09:03

where there might be friction between people

01:09:05

and I'll just use myself and Zach as an example.

01:09:08

Zach was a high-quick start.

01:09:09

I was a, I'm blanking on the terms now.

01:09:14

I was the thinker.

01:09:15

I needed a fact finder.

01:09:16

That's what it is.

01:09:17

I was a high-fact finder.

01:09:18

So because those things are kind of inversely related,

01:09:21

it meant that there was a lot of friction

01:09:23

when Zach and I would work together.

01:09:24

Now there's value in knowing that

01:09:26

because we know that it's gonna be a little bit harder.

01:09:29

We're gonna come at things from different perspectives.

01:09:31

But if we can get over that,

01:09:33

then the end result is gonna be better

01:09:34

because Zach's gonna see things differently

01:09:36

than I'm going to see things.

01:09:38

And you escape like the echo chamber

01:09:40

or the group think on a particular project.

01:09:43

That's something that a lot of companies,

01:09:45

especially as they have bigger teams,

01:09:46

they try to avoid that because if you get a whole bunch

01:09:48

of people who are wired the same way,

01:09:51

then you're not going to even consider

01:09:52

some of the better options that are available there.

01:09:55

That is a cross-functional team though,

01:09:57

is when you have people at opposite ends of the spectrum

01:10:00

who are looking at things from different perspectives.

01:10:03

It doesn't mean that I need to become a high-quick start

01:10:06

or Zach needs to become a high-fact finder.

01:10:08

It means that I'm the fact finder, he's the quick start,

01:10:10

and we're gonna use those as a team together

01:10:13

to land on this is the thing or the things

01:10:15

that are gonna provide the most value

01:10:17

and we're gonna consider all of the options.

01:10:19

- I like that.

01:10:21

Good job.

01:10:22

Well said, Mike.

01:10:23

- Cool.

01:10:24

Let me throw in a couple other just quick things

01:10:26

from this chapter because they're gonna be

01:10:28

fundamental going forward.

01:10:30

This is where he introduces the idea of the Scrum Master.

01:10:33

So he tells this story of the New Zealand All Blacks,

01:10:37

which is the rugby team,

01:10:38

and he uses the analogy of the Scrum Master

01:10:41

as being the coach.

01:10:42

So the question that the Scrum Master needs to ask

01:10:46

all the time is how can we do what we do better?

01:10:50

How can I put the players or the people doing the work

01:10:53

in position to be more successful, get more work done?

01:10:58

Not that they're driving them to the point of exhaustion

01:11:01

or asking them to work harder, longer, whatever.

01:11:04

He kind of reels against that later on

01:11:06

in this book, which is actually where my action item comes from,

01:11:09

my one action item from this book.

01:11:11

(laughs)

01:11:12

But it's about removing the impediments.

01:11:16

So the Scrum Master typically is the person

01:11:19

who is going to be running the sprints.

01:11:23

And so I wanted to make sure that we called out

01:11:25

that Scrum Master 'cause I'm sure it's gonna pop up

01:11:26

a little bit later.

01:11:28

There's also in this section,

01:11:29

the concept of the ideal size for a team.

01:11:33

So I don't know how many people you have at a pro course.

01:11:35

When I was a vision efficiency,

01:11:36

I think we had seven people total.

01:11:38

So the ideal size of a team, he says,

01:11:40

is seven plus or minus two.

01:11:42

And he shares some interesting statistics here

01:11:45

where he talks about how the more resources

01:11:47

actually decrease the velocity or the amount of work

01:11:50

that the team is able to get done.

01:11:52

He mentions a concept called Brooks Law

01:11:54

where adding manpower to a late software project

01:11:56

makes it later. (laughs)

01:11:58

And he mentioned that a large team would take about five times

01:12:02

the number of hours to complete a project.

01:12:06

So this just kind of blew my mind.

01:12:08

And when you think about seven people on a team,

01:12:10

that's not a lot of people.

01:12:13

How many people do you have at a pro course?

01:12:15

And how do you handle this or as you grow,

01:12:19

how are you planning to handle this?

01:12:21

- Yeah, so right now there are four of us

01:12:24

that operate under this structure.

01:12:26

And there's two that operate as technical.

01:12:30

Like if you wanna follow the terminology of Scrum,

01:12:33

there are two people that operate solely as team members.

01:12:36

I operate as the Scrum Master

01:12:39

and then our business development manager

01:12:41

operates as the product owner.

01:12:43

The trick here is that I tend to flip hats quite a bit.

01:12:47

So I operate as a team member as well.

01:12:50

I also because of how I fit,

01:12:53

I fit in that Scrum Master role,

01:12:54

but because I'm also the owner of the company,

01:12:57

I have to step up sometimes and operate as a product owner.

01:13:00

Again, this breaks a lot of rules with it.

01:13:03

I think it only works because I'm pretty good

01:13:05

at switching hats as needed through that process.

01:13:09

So that's, so yes, there's four of us.

01:13:12

We've had the conversation a handful of times

01:13:14

with different clients of can you handle four times

01:13:17

the amount of work if we threw it at you?

01:13:19

And they're not actually wanting to do that.

01:13:21

They just wanna know what our capacity is.

01:13:24

- Right.

01:13:25

- I do have three other guys that I have had conversations

01:13:28

with that I can bring into that mix at any given time.

01:13:32

They've not operated with us at that level yet, but they can.

01:13:37

And so we could up that very quickly if needed to.

01:13:42

So that is a thing that we can grow into,

01:13:46

but I know that because of the way that we operate,

01:13:50

there's enough moving that we have different sub projects

01:13:54

operating within the company as well.

01:13:56

So it'd be very easy for me to say that we got to where

01:13:59

we were, had too many people operating on a team

01:14:01

and it was hard to figure out what was going on with clients.

01:14:04

We would segment it off into where there's like two pools

01:14:06

of clients and operate with two different teams

01:14:09

on two different setups.

01:14:11

Does that make sense?

01:14:12

So then we would have basically two different scrum masters

01:14:14

on that, which might technically be the same person,

01:14:17

but I don't know, that's kind of the part

01:14:19

I would have to figure out when we get there.

01:14:21

But if it got large enough, we would split it

01:14:23

into two different teams.

01:14:25

- Yeah, no, that makes sense.

01:14:26

The one thing that kind of is a question mark still

01:14:30

in the back of my head is assuming that you keep growing

01:14:34

because Asian efficiency never got to the point

01:14:36

where we needed to break out into separate teams.

01:14:38

We did have separate people who dealt with customer success

01:14:41

and I think there was, I'm trying to think of the other

01:14:44

other boards that we had, training, you know,

01:14:47

there's different areas within the company

01:14:48

that people are responsible for, but when it comes to the,

01:14:53

what are the things that are moving the company forward?

01:14:56

Basically everybody was a part of this growth hacking team,

01:14:59

which there's that term growth hacking

01:15:01

that so many people love, but I think it really applies

01:15:05

to the scrum model because hacking kind of implies

01:15:08

like you're doing these little things

01:15:10

that are gonna produce big results

01:15:12

and that's all you do with scrum is you make small adjustments

01:15:14

and remove those impediments and then things get faster.

01:15:17

But I kind of wondering like if you were to use Jira

01:15:21

like we did at Asian efficiency and you had two different

01:15:23

teams now who were responsible for achieving the one big goal

01:15:28

for the company, how does that work and how do you make sure

01:15:31

that people are constantly on the same page?

01:15:34

Probably means another meeting which I hate.

01:15:36

But no, I don't have to worry about it right now obviously,

01:15:41

but as I go into faith-based productivity

01:15:44

and I wanna see that thing grow, I would love to hire

01:15:47

a bunch of people who are helping me grow that thing.

01:15:50

At some point, like that's kind of in the back of my mind

01:15:53

is as this grows potentially, how do I scale it up?

01:15:58

And I know that there's a lot of resources for doing

01:16:00

just that one of them that we use at Asian efficiency

01:16:02

was scaling up.

01:16:03

It's the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 by Vern Harnish

01:16:07

and it's like 400 pages or something.

01:16:08

I haven't gone through the whole thing.

01:16:10

There was like one section of it where we would get into

01:16:12

like the one page strategic plan and all that.

01:16:15

So again, this is probably me worrying about something

01:16:18

I don't need to be worrying about,

01:16:19

but like how do you make sure everybody's pulling

01:16:22

in the same direction?

01:16:23

Because a big part of this is that people are bought in

01:16:27

and they have a sense of purpose behind what they do.

01:16:29

And I think the more segmented or the more teams you have,

01:16:33

the easier it is for that team over there

01:16:36

to get disconnected from the why.

01:16:39

And the big thing that's driving the work that you're doing.

01:16:42

So I don't know, maybe making a bigger deal of it

01:16:45

than it needs to be, but that's just in the back of my mind.

01:16:47

- Yeah, I don't think that I'm not there.

01:16:50

And we've got a ways to go before we get to that point.

01:16:54

If we needed to, when I talk about splitting off

01:16:57

into two different teams, for us, it would probably be

01:17:00

fairly simple to segment like our client work

01:17:03

versus our internal work and put two different teams

01:17:08

working in two different directions on that way, in that way.

01:17:11

And one team's focus is delivering quality code

01:17:16

to our clients.

01:17:17

The other is building our internal services

01:17:20

and building out our strategic services in the long run,

01:17:23

which are subscription style services

01:17:27

that we're starting to get into.

01:17:28

So I could easily see splitting those two teams apart,

01:17:31

whereas right now we operate as one team

01:17:33

that operates on both of those,

01:17:35

which some people may think it's kind of messy.

01:17:37

It actually works out really well.

01:17:39

So I think if we needed to get to the point

01:17:43

where we say had eight or nine people on it,

01:17:46

I think that would be too big for what we're doing.

01:17:48

So I would need to segment those off,

01:17:51

but we're always away from that.

01:17:52

So I haven't spent hardly any time thinking about it.

01:17:54

- Sure, yep.

01:17:56

No worries.

01:17:56

That actually leads into the next chapter on time.

01:18:00

So I'll just jump in here with the daily standup.

01:18:03

This is the short daily meeting.

01:18:07

And one of the key points under the daily standup

01:18:09

and really tied to what we were just talking about

01:18:11

is that the greater the communication saturation,

01:18:13

the faster the team.

01:18:15

Well, the more people that you have,

01:18:17

and ultimately the more teams that you have

01:18:18

under the umbrella of the company,

01:18:21

would argue the harder it is to get that communication saturation.

01:18:25

But the daily standup meeting,

01:18:27

this was something that they started implementing

01:18:28

and they saw 400% improvement in the first week,

01:18:32

which is crazy, but I totally get it.

01:18:34

I think that there's a lot of value in this.

01:18:36

And if you've not done a daily standup

01:18:39

in any of the organizations that you've worked with,

01:18:41

you probably hear that statistic

01:18:42

and you're like, yeah, right,

01:18:43

there is absolutely no way that's gonna happen, but it does.

01:18:47

- Yeah, it does.

01:18:48

- And this is where the Scrum Master

01:18:50

really provides a lot of value

01:18:52

because in the daily standup,

01:18:53

there's three questions that they ask.

01:18:55

What did you do yesterday to help the team finish the sprint?

01:18:58

What will you do today to help the team finish the sprint?

01:19:02

And what obstacles are getting in the team's way?

01:19:05

So again, the Scrum Master's job

01:19:06

is basically to help the team overcome those obstacles

01:19:09

and those impediments that are getting in the way.

01:19:12

And I like the fact that there's two different questions here.

01:19:16

So this is a little bit different

01:19:18

than how we implemented things at Asian deficiency.

01:19:21

We would plan our work

01:19:21

and we would mention what we were gonna be getting done that day.

01:19:24

But I think there is a difference

01:19:26

between what you say you're going to do today

01:19:28

to help the team finish the sprint

01:19:29

and at the time of the daily standup tomorrow,

01:19:32

did you actually do the things

01:19:33

that you said you were gonna do?

01:19:35

- Right.

01:19:36

- Especially if there are obstacles or impediments

01:19:38

that are in the team's way

01:19:40

because a lot of times people will jump in

01:19:42

to help somebody overcome an obstacle

01:19:44

or remove one of those impediments.

01:19:47

And when you do that,

01:19:48

it means that especially if you're a remote team,

01:19:50

you have less time to work on the things

01:19:52

that you had planned to do.

01:19:54

So I think that asking both of those questions is valuable

01:19:57

because if you see a pattern of the things

01:20:00

that I'm planning to do

01:20:02

and then I only get 50% of them done every day

01:20:04

and maybe you even have justifiable excuses

01:20:07

for why you're not getting those things done.

01:20:09

If you are encountering obstacles and impediments

01:20:12

every single day, something is wrong systemically.

01:20:16

At that point, you need to not just solve the thing,

01:20:18

you need to ask the question,

01:20:19

why does this thing keep happening?

01:20:22

And if you're able to remove those things,

01:20:24

then that's when things can really start clicking.

01:20:27

Now on the other end of that,

01:20:28

I've been there where nobody has any obstacles

01:20:31

or roadblocks ever.

01:20:32

And at that point you're like, yeah, right.

01:20:34

(laughs)

01:20:36

You're not telling me the whole story.

01:20:37

(laughs)

01:20:38

No.

01:20:39

In fact, one of the things that would happen

01:20:43

with some of the people on the Asian efficiency team

01:20:46

is that they would lose internet or whatever

01:20:48

and they put no roadblocks, but my internet isn't working.

01:20:51

(laughs)

01:20:52

Like, that's a roadblock.

01:20:53

(laughs)

01:20:54

That's your roadblock.

01:20:55

And that's just an example.

01:20:56

I mean, everybody's got those things

01:20:58

where you think like, oh, it's no big deal.

01:21:00

I don't need to bother other people with this thing.

01:21:02

I don't need to tell that person to stop what they're doing

01:21:05

and help me out.

01:21:06

But Scrum is really based on helping the team.

01:21:09

Especially the Scrum Master.

01:21:11

So that's the other thing I like about this application

01:21:13

of this is it's not me telling the team,

01:21:15

hey, can somebody stop what they're doing and help me out?

01:21:18

Like you're telling the Scrum Master

01:21:19

and their job is to help you remove this thing.

01:21:22

So maybe they can't do it.

01:21:23

Maybe they have to get Joe and accounting

01:21:26

to give you the account passwords or whatever

01:21:29

that you need, but let them do that.

01:21:32

Don't try to solve these things on your own.

01:21:35

Right.

01:21:36

Yeah.

01:21:36

And I will also say,

01:21:38

at Pro Course, when we do our daily standups,

01:21:41

we don't do it on a call because it's,

01:21:45

you know, we're a distributed team

01:21:47

and there are folks that are overseas

01:21:50

as a part of that team.

01:21:51

So it's kind of a mess to try to get it nailed down

01:21:54

every single day when we're going to connect.

01:21:57

So we do it asynchronously and we just do it in text form,

01:22:01

which frankly is kind of nice

01:22:03

because then when you're filling it out,

01:22:05

you're looking at last the yesterday's

01:22:08

and it's like, okay, did I actually do

01:22:10

what I said I was going to do?

01:22:11

And you're sitting here looking at it.

01:22:13

Okay.

01:22:15

The one thing I would say about that is, you know,

01:22:17

the greater the communication saturation,

01:22:19

the faster the team, a lot can be assumed via text.

01:22:24

Yes.

01:22:25

Regarding communication.

01:22:27

And so if you can, I would say it would be better

01:22:30

to use a tool like Zoom where you have a video call

01:22:34

and you're looking at people's faces every day

01:22:36

and you're talking face to face

01:22:38

whether you are in the same room or not,

01:22:40

I think a whole lot more gets communicated that way.

01:22:43

Agreed.

01:22:44

Yeah, if the MVP of the daily standup would be,

01:22:48

this is what I'm going to work on today,

01:22:50

no roadblocks and put that in a Slack message

01:22:52

or whatever thing you use.

01:22:54

I know you don't use Slack.

01:22:55

No.

01:22:56

Well, you do use Slack,

01:22:57

but there was a different tool you mentioned.

01:22:58

Was it Rocket Chat or something?

01:23:00

Rocket Chat is what we use.

01:23:01

It's an open source version of that.

01:23:03

So, you know, and I know I get what you're saying, I do.

01:23:06

I just don't think like right now we're a small enough team

01:23:10

because with two team members three,

01:23:12

if you count me as part of that,

01:23:14

it's still small enough that we can do a ton that way.

01:23:18

And then if something does come up,

01:23:19

we do connect by phone or video throughout the week

01:23:23

as needed.

01:23:24

So that does happen.

01:23:26

But part of the thing that's super helpful

01:23:29

is like in one particular case,

01:23:31

I've got a team member that he's filling that out

01:23:34

and by the time I get up in the morning,

01:23:36

he's already filled it out and he's working on things.

01:23:39

So one of the first things I can do when I get up

01:23:42

is look at the impediments that are in his way,

01:23:44

knock those out first.

01:23:47

That way he's still running it, running at full speed.

01:23:51

And then I can get into some of my pieces,

01:23:54

but that's my job.

01:23:55

Like that's what my goal is.

01:23:58

So it's kind of nice from that stance.

01:24:00

Would it be better by video?

01:24:02

Yes.

01:24:02

I don't think we're big enough for that quite yet.

01:24:05

I think if we added maybe two more team members

01:24:08

and doubled the amount of work that we have coming in,

01:24:12

yeah, I could see doing that pretty easily

01:24:14

and would probably make that move immediately.

01:24:17

So I just don't see us there quite yet.

01:24:19

We just haven't grown to that point in my opinion.

01:24:21

The problem with that approach,

01:24:23

and not saying it's the wrong approach,

01:24:24

but just the thing that will happen that way

01:24:28

is that you hire the two new people

01:24:31

because you got some bigger contracts

01:24:33

and you're trying to get the work done.

01:24:37

At that point, it's hard to say,

01:24:39

okay, let's stop working and add another daily meeting.

01:24:43

Correct.

01:24:44

You know?

01:24:44

Correct.

01:24:45

Especially the first couple times you do it

01:24:46

and people are having tech issues

01:24:48

and Zoom's got an update and you're like,

01:24:51

"Oh, this is just ridiculous.

01:24:52

Let's go back to doing things the way we used to."

01:24:54

(laughs)

01:24:56

So I do think that there is some value in saying,

01:25:00

like, "This is gonna be the thing we're going to do

01:25:02

as we get bigger, so let's implement it now

01:25:05

and build around it."

01:25:06

But I think it's fine to work the way

01:25:09

that you're working too.

01:25:10

Also, the people that you are working with

01:25:13

are really important.

01:25:15

And if they are bought in and they're making this work,

01:25:19

actually, ultimately, they're gonna be the ones

01:25:21

that make this work or not work.

01:25:22

Right.

01:25:23

And so, how much communication do you need

01:25:27

before you have saturated your team

01:25:29

with the communication of the vision?

01:25:31

You know, I think it was Sean McCabe who said

01:25:33

that you really haven't communicated your vision

01:25:35

until people can communicate it back to you.

01:25:39

And maybe you can do that via text

01:25:41

and never having a video call.

01:25:43

My experience, though, video is much more effective

01:25:48

when it comes to that sort of stuff.

01:25:50

And that's just my own personal experience.

01:25:52

It's not saying that you have to do it that way,

01:25:55

but it's something that I think not just you,

01:25:57

but the listener, if you're looking to implement Scrum,

01:26:00

it's something that you should think about.

01:26:02

Because when it comes to your vision,

01:26:04

you really can't over-communicate the vision.

01:26:07

You can under-communicate it,

01:26:08

and then after a while, there's gonna be big problems

01:26:11

that you can go back and you can fix,

01:26:13

but that's gonna cost you more than the daily stand-up

01:26:17

and figuring out a way to consistently make sure

01:26:19

that everybody is on the same page

01:26:21

and pulling in the same direction.

01:26:23

So, I'm trying to say this, say it nicely,

01:26:25

where I'm not saying like, you have to do this, Joe,

01:26:27

because I don't think you do have to do it.

01:26:29

But I think the general rule,

01:26:31

like there's always gonna be exceptions

01:26:32

and you can modify Scrum, however you want.

01:26:34

This is one of the things I think you can definitely modify

01:26:36

to fit the way that your team works,

01:26:38

but I would encourage people to err on the side of caution

01:26:42

when it comes to communicating with your team.

01:26:43

- Correct, yeah.

01:26:45

Quick note there, in our case, the team,

01:26:48

we're doing it the other way around.

01:26:49

Like the team is bought in.

01:26:51

They tend to iterate to me what we're trying to accomplish,

01:26:55

as a company, so that's, I think you just referred to that.

01:26:58

But yeah, they tend to refer the vision to me

01:27:02

on a number of cases.

01:27:03

So, things like a text-based stand-up are pretty easy,

01:27:07

because they know the long-term goal,

01:27:10

like they know the intent of these products and services

01:27:12

and what it is that we're doing, like they know that.

01:27:15

And they're pretty excited about them.

01:27:17

So, that's a thing that I'm not,

01:27:19

like I don't have to worry about that piece right now.

01:27:21

We do spend some time on video once a week

01:27:24

for our sprint calls, which hopefully we'll get to here soon.

01:27:28

We got a lot on this list yet, Mike.

01:27:29

(Mike laughs)

01:27:30

But, you know, this is a thing that I feel like

01:27:33

we have a pretty good handle on,

01:27:36

which is why I think we get away with it.

01:27:37

So, there's a lot of nuance and subtlety with it.

01:27:40

It's kind of hard to get some of that across

01:27:42

in the macro side of this, but.

01:27:44

- Yep.

01:27:45

- I feel like for us, the text version does do a pretty good job,

01:27:49

but it's because I feel like we're all bought in.

01:27:51

- Sure, yep, makes sense.

01:27:54

- One other thing in this chapter before we move on,

01:27:57

so this isn't a three hour episode,

01:28:00

is the cool concept of sprints,

01:28:01

which we've referred to in this episode,

01:28:03

but basically the way Scrum works is you have a sprint,

01:28:07

which you can define for yourself.

01:28:10

I think typically they're in weak intervals,

01:28:12

so one week, two weeks, three weeks, even four weeks.

01:28:15

- I think the standard is two weeks.

01:28:16

- Two weeks, yeah.

01:28:18

I think two weeks is probably the place to start,

01:28:21

depending on the size of the team

01:28:22

and the size of your projects.

01:28:24

Maybe you wanna make it shorter,

01:28:25

maybe you wanna make it longer,

01:28:26

but two weeks is definitely where I would begin

01:28:30

with implementing this because you don't want problems

01:28:32

to exist for more than two weeks,

01:28:34

and there will be problems at the beginning

01:28:36

of implementing Scrum.

01:28:37

So you do need to check in every two weeks,

01:28:40

go through that retrospective process

01:28:41

and figure out what are the things

01:28:43

that are keeping the team from increasing their velocity

01:28:46

or how fast they can work.

01:28:47

- Yeah, quick sign up though.

01:28:48

We do one week sprints, but we work in software,

01:28:52

so things move fast.

01:28:54

We at one point even debated doing three-day sprints,

01:28:57

but that seemed like a bit overkill,

01:29:00

so we stick with one weeks.

01:29:02

- Yeah, I think one week is probably ideal

01:29:05

for a lot of teams.

01:29:06

I think the more often you check in,

01:29:09

the better off you're gonna be,

01:29:10

especially if you're a remote team.

01:29:11

- Right, right.

01:29:12

I think that's also what gets us away,

01:29:14

what helps us do text-based stand-ups, so.

01:29:18

There you go.

01:29:20

- Waste is a crime, chapter five.

01:29:22

- Okay, so this section we can move through quickly,

01:29:26

but this is also where my one action item comes from.

01:29:28

So.

01:29:29

- So not quickly.

01:29:30

- Well, in the previous chapter,

01:29:33

he mentions on page 81 that wasting time

01:29:36

is a slow form of suicide, which is a little bit strong,

01:29:40

but makes the point.

01:29:42

In chapter five, he talks about how 85% of effort is wasted.

01:29:47

He breaks it down into three different types of waste,

01:29:50

and I'm gonna mess up how to pronounce these words.

01:29:52

Murray, which is waste through unreasonableness,

01:29:56

and that's where planning comes in.

01:29:57

Murah, which is waste through inconsistency,

01:30:00

that's where doing the work comes in.

01:30:02

And Mudah, which is waste through outcomes,

01:30:05

and this is where you need to be reviewing and checking things.

01:30:08

All right, and then there are a couple things

01:30:12

that cause people to work harder and longer than necessary.

01:30:16

He also adds one to this section.

01:30:17

He says there's three things and then gives four.

01:30:20

So the first one is absurdity.

01:30:22

The second one is unreasonable expectations.

01:30:25

The third one is overburden,

01:30:26

and then the fourth one is emotional waste.

01:30:29

Okay, so this stuff really resonated with me.

01:30:34

Like, and I don't, I think I tend to overuse that word too,

01:30:38

so I'm gonna try to remove, resonate from my vocabulary.

01:30:40

But these are things that really made me think.

01:30:43

These are things that I had an emotional response

01:30:46

to when I read this.

01:30:48

There's also a story in here, Scott Maxwell.

01:30:52

This is a guy who started working at a company

01:30:54

and it was expected that everybody worked every day.

01:30:56

So he started working seven days, then he went to six days,

01:31:00

then he went to five days.

01:31:02

Okay, and he mentions in here that he always wanted to try

01:31:06

four days or even three days,

01:31:08

but he wasn't sure the company would let him.

01:31:11

And we've probably all seen those graphs

01:31:13

of how much you get done and how many hours you put in.

01:31:16

And I think a lot of them say the peak

01:31:17

is at like 39 hours per week.

01:31:19

That's like maximum productivity.

01:31:21

And after that point, it just goes way down.

01:31:23

I kind of think that there's a 80/20 to this.

01:31:29

And 80/20 isn't the right term because that kind of implies

01:31:36

that you're gonna get 80% of your work done,

01:31:38

but you're only gonna work one day a week.

01:31:39

That's not what I'm saying.

01:31:41

But as you're ascending that curve,

01:31:44

there is a point where this is the absolute best point

01:31:49

in terms of I can still get a lot of stuff done.

01:31:53

And I am maximizing my effort because I'm not working

01:31:57

harder or longer than necessary based on absurdity

01:32:01

and reasonable expectations over a burden or emotional waste.

01:32:05

Okay, in my action item, and there's no way I'm gonna

01:32:08

be implementing this right now.

01:32:10

- Why not?

01:32:11

- So maybe we don't even follow up on this next time.

01:32:13

Maybe we check in in three months, whatever.

01:32:15

- Give me the pig.

01:32:16

- I'm not committing to this right now.

01:32:18

But this challenged me this whole idea

01:32:21

of working four days a week.

01:32:23

And when I mentioned this to my wife

01:32:25

as I was reading this section, she got really excited.

01:32:28

So I know I'm gonna have some support in trying this out,

01:32:34

but I don't feel like I need to establish a new normal first.

01:32:39

Once I do that, then I can figure out

01:32:41

what's the most efficient and effective way

01:32:44

to get the work that I need to get done done.

01:32:46

But right now, everything is kind of in flux

01:32:48

and I don't even know what that looks like.

01:32:51

So this is definitely not the time to say,

01:32:53

I'm only gonna work four days a week.

01:32:56

But this is on my radar.

01:32:57

And I think that this is a really cool idea,

01:33:01

not just because I have an extra day to do nothing,

01:33:05

which is where a lot of people would think,

01:33:07

how a lot of people would think about this.

01:33:10

I don't view that day as doing nothing.

01:33:13

I view that that day as being,

01:33:15

maybe that's my thinking day,

01:33:17

where that's when I'm gonna do nothing.

01:33:21

But backlog grooming, if we're gonna do something

01:33:25

as a family, that would be the day that we do that.

01:33:27

So still quote unquote working,

01:33:29

but I'm checking different boxes,

01:33:31

different areas of the wheel of life

01:33:34

and having that built into a regular cadence

01:33:37

where this is the day for all of these different things

01:33:40

that happen.

01:33:41

That's really appealing to me.

01:33:42

And based on Scott Maxwell's story,

01:33:45

I wanna give this a shot.

01:33:46

- Yeah, I wanna report on this one

01:33:48

'cause I think this would be exciting to see.

01:33:50

I don't think I could do it.

01:33:52

I have too many ideas that I wanna act on.

01:33:55

Even like if I took a day off,

01:33:56

I'd just be trying to go play on a computer to play

01:33:59

different ideas that I had.

01:34:01

So I don't think that would work out for me,

01:34:02

but I think it would be kind of a cool thing.

01:34:04

And I think you could probably pull that off.

01:34:06

I'm definitely curious to see how this works for you.

01:34:08

- Yeah, well, just as another anecdote to this,

01:34:12

I've read as a gap book not too long ago.

01:34:15

It doesn't have to be crazy at work by the Basecamp guys.

01:34:17

They in the summer 'cause they're in Chicago, I believe.

01:34:20

And summer is the only time of the year

01:34:22

that it's nice in the Midwest.

01:34:24

- Yeah.

01:34:25

- They work four day weeks during the summer.

01:34:28

And when I read that,

01:34:30

that I think they do 10 hour days,

01:34:31

but from what I gathered,

01:34:34

it really wasn't, the emphasis wasn't on the 40 hours per week.

01:34:39

And that's kind of the point he's making in this chapter

01:34:41

is that you measure the output, not the time spent.

01:34:44

Okay, so if I'm measuring the output

01:34:46

and maybe I am working longer on those four days a week,

01:34:49

maybe I am still getting to 39 hours

01:34:52

or wherever that tipping point is,

01:34:55

is the most productive point

01:34:56

for how I could spend my time in a week.

01:34:59

But having a whole day set aside

01:35:02

for other things that are important,

01:35:04

that is traditionally assigned to doing more work,

01:35:09

I think there's a lot of value in that approach.

01:35:11

And so the fact that the Basecamp guys can do it,

01:35:13

at least in the summer, that raises the question,

01:35:15

well, why can't you do that all year round?

01:35:18

So I don't know, maybe you can.

01:35:20

(laughing)

01:35:21

Let's see.

01:35:22

- I think if I was, you know,

01:35:25

'cause I'm planning to join a company

01:35:27

at some point here in the near future.

01:35:28

And I think if I were to stay out on my own,

01:35:32

I would maybe consider that.

01:35:33

If I got like the client side of it offloaded 100%,

01:35:37

I could definitely see experimenting with that.

01:35:39

It's just not reasonable right now.

01:35:41

Like it's not a thing I could try to do.

01:35:43

But I definitely have an interest in it.

01:35:45

So I'm not taking it as an action item by any means,

01:35:48

but I will definitely hold you to yours.

01:35:51

- Yeah, just give me some time.

01:35:53

(laughing)

01:35:55

Check back, what is this?

01:35:56

Episode 58. - 58.

01:36:00

Maybe by 65.

01:36:03

We can-- - Nah, we're gonna look at 60.

01:36:05

- All right, go for it,

01:36:06

but it's not gonna be implemented by 60.

01:36:07

I can do that. (laughing)

01:36:11

- Oh, fun times.

01:36:12

All right, let's keep going.

01:36:13

Chapter six, plan reality, not fantasy.

01:36:17

- Yeah, so this is where a lot of key scrum elements

01:36:22

come in and I put a whole bunch of stuff in here.

01:36:27

We don't have to go deep on a lot of this stuff.

01:36:29

I do wanna touch on this Fibonacci sequence.

01:36:32

This is the series of numbers that they use

01:36:36

when estimating story points.

01:36:39

And I guess we didn't really talk about stories.

01:36:41

Well, I guess that's in this chapter two.

01:36:42

- Yeah.

01:36:43

- So an essential piece of scrum is that

01:36:45

for every task that you create, you write a story.

01:36:48

And the story has to be in a particular format.

01:36:52

There's three parts, who, what, and why.

01:36:54

So as the business, we want to do X,

01:36:58

so that we achieve Y.

01:37:01

And when you write it that way,

01:37:02

that means that whoever's picking up that task

01:37:05

can clearly understand what they're supposed to do

01:37:08

and why they're doing it.

01:37:11

And that's a big part of getting people

01:37:13

to have purpose behind what they're doing,

01:37:14

which is a key piece to increasing the velocity

01:37:19

or how much work people can get done.

01:37:21

All right, so that's cool.

01:37:25

And in Jira, you've got space for not only that,

01:37:28

but also the story points,

01:37:30

which is kind of the estimate on how much effort

01:37:32

something is going to be.

01:37:34

So something that's really simple might be one story point

01:37:36

and something that's really complicated.

01:37:40

The one story point issue maybe takes you an hour,

01:37:43

eight story points, maybe that's something

01:37:44

that if that's the only thing you worked on,

01:37:45

that would take an entire day.

01:37:47

And the story points that get assigned are not arbitrary.

01:37:51

They're not just an estimate of how long you think

01:37:53

this is gonna take.

01:37:53

They follow a specific sequence.

01:37:56

So the sequence goes one, two, three, five, eight,

01:37:59

13, 21, 34, 55, and you could probably just keep going.

01:38:04

But each number in the sequence is the sum

01:38:07

of the two previous numbers.

01:38:10

So three story points, one plus two,

01:38:12

five story points, two plus three,

01:38:14

eight story points, five plus three.

01:38:16

Okay, you get the idea here.

01:38:18

And what this does is it makes it easier to estimate

01:38:22

because you can choose which one something is closer to.

01:38:25

So we're terrible at picking out a number out of the hat

01:38:29

for how much effort something is going to be.

01:38:32

But we are pretty good at estimating this thing

01:38:34

is closer to this than that.

01:38:37

So he uses an example of like the story points

01:38:40

representing different size dogs.

01:38:41

And he's like, is this a Chihuahua,

01:38:44

or is this a golden retriever?

01:38:46

And viewing it that way, it's a lot easier

01:38:50

to get accurate estimates for things.

01:38:53

So as Fibonacci sequence,

01:38:54

this is and this is something that you sent me

01:38:57

your screenshot 'cause we were both playing around

01:38:59

with implementing this in OmniFocus.

01:39:03

So you follow Fibonacci sequences here for a little while,

01:39:07

but then you kind of get off it at 20.

01:39:10

I was curious why you did that.

01:39:13

Yeah, it's a pretty common thing.

01:39:16

Like that's not a thing that I made up.

01:39:19

That's a pretty common deal.

01:39:20

I forget the, there's different ways

01:39:22

that you can pick the numbers for this.

01:39:24

Fibonacci is a common one,

01:39:26

but this is like a runoff of that.

01:39:28

Okay.

01:39:29

And it starts at 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13,

01:39:33

but then it deviates from the Fibonacci.

01:39:35

And instead of 21, it goes to 20.

01:39:37

So 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and then it quits.

01:39:42

Like that's a pretty common scrum methodology

01:39:45

for story points.

01:39:47

It's what we use at ProCourse.

01:39:49

Gotcha.

01:39:50

I'm trying to remember why we decided.

01:39:51

I think it had to do with it was easier to remember

01:39:53

'cause it's 20, 40, 100 is easier to remember

01:39:56

than the 21, what is it, 53?

01:39:59

Like I don't know what those numbers are.

01:40:00

21, 34, 55, yeah.

01:40:02

Yeah, it's easier to remember 20, 40, 100

01:40:05

than it is to remember those.

01:40:07

And it has to do with how many,

01:40:10

like how easy is it to memorize sequences of numbers

01:40:13

and what your brain can handle

01:40:14

versus the general public being able to memorize things?

01:40:17

That's where that tends to come from, I think.

01:40:19

Gotcha.

01:40:20

Not 100% on that, but that's where those numbers come from.

01:40:23

And again, it's what we use at ProCourse.

01:40:26

'Cause when we write our stories,

01:40:28

typically it's me or our development manager

01:40:31

who are writing those.

01:40:33

But then there's also,

01:40:35

and I guess I'll go on to the next piece here

01:40:36

for this planning poker.

01:40:38

Yeah, I was gonna ask if you guys use this.

01:40:40

We haven't, but we're going to,

01:40:42

in just a few days,

01:40:43

we're gonna do our first poker session.

01:40:45

Are you buying everybody the cards?

01:40:47

No, Jira has a thing that you can build into it

01:40:49

and it's all digital, so.

01:40:52

Oh, nice.

01:40:52

That's what we'll end up using, but.

01:40:54

You know, we write the stories of what needs to go in there

01:40:57

and then we use the story points

01:40:59

through the Fibonacci runoff.

01:41:01

But then the other thing that,

01:41:03

and he talks about this in the book is,

01:41:04

you know, we're really bad at it.

01:41:06

To your point, Mike, we're bad at coming up

01:41:08

with a number.

01:41:09

We're good at relative.

01:41:10

Is this an eight or a 13?

01:41:12

Like, that's a lot easier than, is this an eight or a nine?

01:41:15

That's why you use those Fibonacci pieces.

01:41:17

But the other thing that you wanna do long term,

01:41:20

so that you can do some of the reporting and get better

01:41:22

at judging how much you can do,

01:41:26

you want your story points to be accurate relative

01:41:30

to each other.

01:41:31

Yes.

01:41:32

And although I could just go assign story points,

01:41:36

what I think is a 13, someone else on the team

01:41:39

might think is a three and someone else may think it's a 40.

01:41:42

And if that's the case,

01:41:43

then we need to have a discussion about

01:41:45

what does this involve in,

01:41:47

what's the right method to do this thing.

01:41:50

And how complex is it.

01:41:52

So, you know, and we also need to compare it to

01:41:55

what are some of the other stories we've done in the past

01:41:57

that are 13s or the others that we've done that are 40s

01:42:00

and does this play into those.

01:42:02

So it helps you stay accurate as compared to yourself.

01:42:06

The planning poker method,

01:42:08

and what you're referring to with the cards is

01:42:11

you can get these cards that have your numbers on them.

01:42:14

And everybody, you know, you put the story up

01:42:17

that you're trying to estimate.

01:42:18

How many story points is this story?

01:42:21

You put that up on the screen or, you know, mention it.

01:42:24

And then everybody lays down the number

01:42:26

that they would like to estimate it at, face down.

01:42:29

When everybody's played their card, you show the number.

01:42:31

And if they're all the same, great, that's your estimate.

01:42:34

If they're different, you take the average of those.

01:42:39

You know, if they're all within one step of each other,

01:42:40

you take the average of them.

01:42:43

And then that becomes your estimate.

01:42:45

But if someone is two steps removed,

01:42:48

like say I play a 13 and Mike plays a two,

01:42:50

we're more than two steps apart.

01:42:53

And then that means you have to have a conversation about it.

01:42:56

And then you pull all your cards in

01:42:57

and then you do it again.

01:42:58

And you have that whole estimation process a second time.

01:43:03

And you keep doing that until you get within one step,

01:43:05

average it and you're good to go.

01:43:06

So we have not done this at Pro Course,

01:43:09

but we're planning to.

01:43:10

And, you know, I'll have to report next time

01:43:12

like how that goes, but it's kind of a,

01:43:14

it'll be kind of different

01:43:15

because we'll have to do it asynchronously.

01:43:17

We won't be able to do it all in one shot or altogether.

01:43:20

We don't have the time to do it in our weekly calls

01:43:23

'cause Joe doesn't like meetings.

01:43:25

And Scrum per the book has a lot of meetings in it.

01:43:29

And I don't like that.

01:43:30

So. - Yes, it does.

01:43:32

- I deviate from that piece quite a bit.

01:43:34

So I'm trying to, I try to build

01:43:36

in some of the async pieces to help with that.

01:43:39

But the other side of this story point estimation piece

01:43:42

that you get is you'll hear people talk about a burn down chart.

01:43:48

For a sprint.

01:43:49

And what that means is you have the number,

01:43:51

say it's a hundred points that you're gonna do

01:43:52

across the team in one week.

01:43:55

Across the week, you can see the chart go from

01:43:58

number of points is up the Y axis and the days go

01:44:02

across the X axis.

01:44:04

And you should see that at a hundred at the very top.

01:44:06

And as you go across the time, it goes down towards zero.

01:44:09

That's ideal.

01:44:10

That's how you can see your burn down across that.

01:44:13

That also helps you determine what the velocity

01:44:15

of the team is.

01:44:16

And it helps you figure out how many story points

01:44:18

you can do in a week.

01:44:20

Which is also helpful, especially if you're

01:44:23

in a business like what we do.

01:44:24

It means that I can estimate along with the team

01:44:28

how many story points a client project is going to take.

01:44:31

Which means that I then have a pretty good feel

01:44:34

for how long, like what kind of time estimates

01:44:36

do I need to give the client on the other side of things

01:44:40

as to how long it's gonna take before we release it.

01:44:42

So it's pretty helpful in that sense.

01:44:44

So I'm a pretty big fan of the whole velocity piece.

01:44:47

So it's a thing that I can appreciate.

01:44:50

But that's also me as the owner.

01:44:53

And the person who's the product owner here

01:44:55

in some regards talking to clients.

01:44:57

It's super helpful in that sense.

01:45:00

As a team member, I tend to get a little nervous with it

01:45:03

'cause I always wonder like the people

01:45:04

who are looking at this, am I doing enough?

01:45:06

Are they wanting me to do more?

01:45:07

Like I get a little nervous from that stance.

01:45:09

So you have to kind of ease your team members mindset

01:45:13

and show them how it helps them.

01:45:14

And it's not a thing you're gonna use against them

01:45:16

because you will not use it against them.

01:45:18

Please don't use it against them.

01:45:21

That is not what you need it for, for anything.

01:45:24

- Right.

01:45:25

I wanna go back to the planning poker thing real quickly

01:45:27

and then I've got a little rant on the velocity piece.

01:45:29

- All right.

01:45:31

- So the planning poker, you mentioned like

01:45:34

if the numbers are more than three cards apart,

01:45:37

the high and the low numbers talk about why they think

01:45:40

the number that they picked is the right number.

01:45:43

And then as you mentioned, you do another round

01:45:46

of planning poker.

01:45:47

This is the thing that makes me nervous

01:45:53

about the planning poker stuff.

01:45:54

And this kind of ties into the next chapter.

01:46:00

There's a concept of what he calls the wise fool.

01:46:04

And I'll just mention this real quickly

01:46:07

because it applies to this thing here as well.

01:46:10

The wise fool is somebody who asks the uncomfortable questions

01:46:15

or raises the uncomfortable truths.

01:46:21

And this was me at Asian efficiency.

01:46:23

I was always the person saying,

01:46:25

"This is way more work than you guys are thinking."

01:46:28

- Sure, sure.

01:46:29

- I can also say that after a while,

01:46:32

it is hard to embrace that role as the wise fool.

01:46:36

And the point that he makes in the next chapter

01:46:38

is if you've got wise fools, then you need to make sure

01:46:42

that they feel safe and they're not holding things back.

01:46:47

But one of the things that caused some friction, I guess,

01:46:52

was the fact that I was always the wise fool

01:46:57

because I right or wrong.

01:46:59

And I don't think the team did anything

01:47:01

to facilitate this thought process,

01:47:05

but it was still there.

01:47:07

As the person who was always saying,

01:47:08

"This is gonna be more effort.

01:47:10

We have to cut back the things that we're going to do,"

01:47:12

which is very anti-scrum and anti-velocity.

01:47:15

As a person who's always pushing back on things,

01:47:20

the tendency is to say,

01:47:23

"Well, maybe you're right, maybe it's less."

01:47:26

Pretty much every time I did that, though, I regretted it.

01:47:29

(laughing)

01:47:30

So in this planning poker,

01:47:33

we didn't implement planning poker

01:47:34

to the letter of the law like they did here.

01:47:37

We just would groom the backlog

01:47:38

and then as we were doing the backlog grooming call

01:47:41

before we did our sprint call,

01:47:42

we would talk about why we think that certain tasks

01:47:45

are certain amount of story points.

01:47:47

And as long as you have people on the team

01:47:49

who are understanding of the point of view that you have,

01:47:54

then you can absolutely implement planning poker

01:47:57

and there will be no issues.

01:47:59

And I'm not saying that this happened at Asian efficiency,

01:48:00

but I can totally see a scenario where this would happen,

01:48:03

where people are just like, "Ah, that's easy."

01:48:05

And they're not involved with it

01:48:06

because they don't understand

01:48:08

that's not their domain of expertise.

01:48:10

And so I say, "No, that's three."

01:48:12

And you're like, "No, this is 21."

01:48:14

Like, as the person who is saying,

01:48:17

because at that point when you're saying,

01:48:19

"This is 21 story points," you are the impediment.

01:48:22

You are the thing that is keeping the team

01:48:24

from achieving their goal.

01:48:26

So the pressure is on you to acquiesce to the lower numbers.

01:48:32

And so as you start implementing this,

01:48:34

make sure that people don't feel that way.

01:48:36

- Yeah, I know that the benefit that we have

01:48:40

is we're talking about software.

01:48:42

We're not talking about how many videos

01:48:45

and how much time is this video we're gonna take to produce.

01:48:48

Or, and you don't get what I'm saying,

01:48:50

like a course, a video course

01:48:52

versus adding buttons to a website.

01:48:55

For us, if someone has a discrepancy

01:48:58

with a number of points,

01:48:59

I can easily see that this is actually

01:49:01

a really good teaching tool or a good learning process.

01:49:04

Because if someone thinks it's a three

01:49:06

and someone else thinks it's a 13,

01:49:09

there's a pretty good chance that the person who sees it

01:49:12

a three knows a way to do it that's very simple.

01:49:16

- Or they don't understand the complexity of the task

01:49:19

'cause the story isn't written well enough.

01:49:21

- Yeah, like there's a description,

01:49:23

which means I need to do a better job

01:49:25

as the person writing those stories.

01:49:28

But that's, to me, I can see it as a pretty good learning.

01:49:31

- It's a very good process there.

01:49:32

But I think you're right.

01:49:33

If someone's saying, no, it's more complicated than that,

01:49:37

I think that's up to the scrum master

01:49:38

to make sure that that voice is heard.

01:49:40

- Yes.

01:49:41

- And remains heard.

01:49:42

I think that's where that comes in.

01:49:44

And if that person is not listened to,

01:49:46

you're gonna defeat them and they're gonna be upset

01:49:50

in the long run.

01:49:52

- Yeah, which is, this ties into velocity then

01:49:55

because you wanna figure out how fast your team can go

01:49:59

and then you wanna remove the impediment

01:50:00

so they can go even faster.

01:50:02

Couple of issues with this though.

01:50:05

If you're constantly asking the question that he tells you

01:50:07

to ask in this chapter, how can we go even faster

01:50:11

as someone who was typically the roadblock, like I said,

01:50:15

or the wise fool always pushing back on things

01:50:17

and saying that they're gonna take longer,

01:50:19

one way for the team to go faster

01:50:22

would be to get rid of you.

01:50:24

(laughs)

01:50:24

Or at least not invite you to the meetings, you know?

01:50:26

And I don't think that's a great approach

01:50:30

and I'm definitely not projecting that that's what happened

01:50:32

with Asian efficiency by the way.

01:50:33

I loved our meetings and people told me all the time

01:50:36

that they appreciated the feedback that I gave

01:50:38

because I do tend to overthink things, over analyze things.

01:50:43

And there were times when I thought things might be

01:50:46

a little bit harder than they were going to be.

01:50:48

And at some point, you know, you have to disagree

01:50:50

but commit that Jeff Bezos thing.

01:50:52

And that's fine, you know, I'm happy to do that.

01:50:54

And then we'll just learn from it, you know, if I was right,

01:50:57

then we'll adjust it for next time.

01:50:59

If I was wrong, great, you know, we can move a little bit faster.

01:51:02

So I definitely don't think there was any animosity there.

01:51:06

But if the question that you're constantly asking

01:51:09

is how can we go even faster,

01:51:11

the cheater, quick way to do that is to estimate things

01:51:13

as less effort.

01:51:15

But when you do that, you're going to diminish

01:51:17

the quality of the thing that you are producing.

01:51:20

That is not in alignment with true scrum, I would argue.

01:51:25

- Right.

01:51:26

- Also, if you're constantly asking this question,

01:51:28

especially as you're beginning to implement scrum,

01:51:30

you're removing impediments,

01:51:31

you're accelerating your velocity, that's great.

01:51:34

There's got to be a point though,

01:51:36

where you've hit diminishing returns.

01:51:39

And I am uncomfortable with the idea of every single sprint,

01:51:44

if we're not increasing our velocity, then we have failed.

01:51:48

Which is kind of the, not explicitly stated,

01:51:52

but communicated message in this book

01:51:56

is that you should constantly be improving your velocity.

01:51:59

Okay?

01:52:00

There's, in order to do that though,

01:52:02

you need to take into account everything

01:52:04

that you are going to be doing.

01:52:06

So we got that question at Asian efficiency.

01:52:09

How can we increase our velocity?

01:52:12

And the problem was that there were a whole bunch of things

01:52:14

that were quote unquote, keeping the lights on,

01:52:17

creating podcast episodes, writing blog posts,

01:52:20

like the regular content schedule.

01:52:22

That's part of the normal amount of things

01:52:26

that need to be done.

01:52:27

And then you've got obviously the additional stuff

01:52:28

that you want to do, creating new products,

01:52:30

doing launches, things like that.

01:52:32

So you've got to balance those two things.

01:52:35

And then you get to the point where,

01:52:38

like if you have things that aren't being tracked

01:52:41

on that board, going back to your email as an example,

01:52:45

at some point you are making the decision,

01:52:47

this is the most important thing that I can be doing right now,

01:52:50

but every minute that you're spending in your email,

01:52:52

you're not contributing to improving the velocity.

01:52:55

So if you're really asking this question all the time,

01:52:59

you're going to feel guilty every time you go into your email.

01:53:02

You get what I'm saying, and it doesn't have to be email,

01:53:03

it could be something else that maybe is keeping the lights on,

01:53:07

maybe is bringing value to the organization.

01:53:09

But if it is not being tracked on the sprint board,

01:53:12

and it is not contributing to the velocity,

01:53:15

the natural argument is going to be

01:53:16

that you should not be doing that thing.

01:53:18

And I think that is a gross generalization

01:53:20

that is very often wrong.

01:53:22

And I also think that at some point,

01:53:24

you can achieve a certain velocity,

01:53:26

you can be doing things really, really well,

01:53:28

things are humming.

01:53:30

At that point, just be happy with the way things are.

01:53:33

Yes, look for ways that you can improve things,

01:53:36

yes, ask the same questions,

01:53:38

but don't feel like you've got to squeeze out

01:53:41

every drop of efficiency from this thing.

01:53:45

I think like there's, if you have this question being asked,

01:53:48

the other way that you can quickly increase the velocity

01:53:51

is everybody could work a little bit more.

01:53:53

And then the next sprint, you work a little bit more.

01:53:55

And the next sprint, you work a little bit more,

01:53:56

and a little bit more.

01:53:57

And pretty soon you're working 80 hour weeks

01:53:59

because you got to keep boosting your velocity,

01:54:03

and then at that point, things get to the,

01:54:05

things crash, go over the cliff,

01:54:07

and you got to hit the reset button,

01:54:09

okay, where do we go wrong?

01:54:10

And it's all these little things,

01:54:12

but I totally see this question,

01:54:14

how can we go even faster

01:54:16

as the thing that could get you to that place?

01:54:18

- I don't ask this question.

01:54:20

Yeah, I don't like it.

01:54:21

I don't like it.

01:54:22

I think that it's fair for this groundmaster

01:54:24

to go through the retrospective

01:54:26

and think how can we improve things,

01:54:28

but how can we go faster?

01:54:30

That just implies like, okay,

01:54:32

you did a great job last sprint.

01:54:33

Now do more.

01:54:34

- Yeah.

01:54:35

- And do more, and do more.

01:54:36

Keep putting more weight on the bar.

01:54:37

At some point, I'm not an Olympic weight lifter.

01:54:40

I'm not gonna be able to do anymore.

01:54:42

(laughing)

01:54:44

- Yeah, I don't ask if what would help us go faster.

01:54:47

I do ask if that was the right number of story points.

01:54:51

- Yep.

01:54:52

- And it's a very distinct difference

01:54:53

because I'm trying to figure out

01:54:55

if they are comfortable at that number.

01:54:58

I'm also asking not how do we go faster,

01:55:02

but do we have systems that are slowing you down?

01:55:06

Like what is a thing that is getting in our way

01:55:10

that we spend a lot of time on every week?

01:55:13

Things like spinning up demo servers.

01:55:16

I've talked about that before,

01:55:17

where we have to put a stage system in place

01:55:20

so that we can test the system and get it out the door.

01:55:23

Like that's a thing that we have to do.

01:55:25

Well, how do I cut the time back on that

01:55:27

so that I can get a demo server quicker?

01:55:29

Like that would be an important thing,

01:55:31

and maybe it's worth us putting a few story points

01:55:33

to streamlining that.

01:55:34

- Yep.

01:55:34

- That we will do, but how do I increase our,

01:55:38

like how do we move faster?

01:55:40

That to me asking that question is disheartening.

01:55:43

- Yep.

01:55:44

- So I have a hard time with that.

01:55:45

I'm more of one who wants to ask the questions around that

01:55:49

that help them figure out how to help themselves.

01:55:52

- Exactly.

01:55:52

- You know, that's more of what I'm trying to do

01:55:54

'cause I don't want us to get to a point

01:55:56

where it's all about the number of points we can crank through.

01:55:59

Like that's not the point here, no pun intended.

01:56:04

Like that's the, you know, that could be our goal,

01:56:07

but our real goal is are we writing the correct stories

01:56:12

to begin with?

01:56:12

- Yep.

01:56:13

- Are we focusing in the right areas?

01:56:16

Or are we making the right strategic decisions

01:56:18

and then focusing our points towards those?

01:56:20

That's my intent there.

01:56:22

You know, as Scrum Master that team,

01:56:24

that's what I'm trying to do.

01:56:25

- Yep.

01:56:26

I think that the description of Scrum in this book

01:56:29

assumes that everybody on the team

01:56:33

has made work their sole reason for living.

01:56:37

(laughing)

01:56:37

They are constantly gonna be looking for ways

01:56:40

to get just a little bit more velocity.

01:56:43

- Right.

01:56:43

- Which is fine.

01:56:45

Like you can really believe in the work that you're doing.

01:56:47

You can have a purpose behind what you're doing.

01:56:49

That makes total sense.

01:56:51

But if you were to embrace this for ProCourse,

01:56:55

the way that, at least the way that I read it,

01:56:57

and I don't think this is explicitly what he's saying,

01:56:59

but this is the message that got communicated to me.

01:57:02

Well, let's say you really wanna grow ProCourse

01:57:04

and you're all in with Scrum

01:57:05

and you're gonna ask this question,

01:57:06

which I know you're not going to 'cause you just said so,

01:57:08

but you're gonna ask every sprint,

01:57:09

how can we go even faster?

01:57:11

At some point, you're gonna,

01:57:13

'cause we're recording this in the middle of the day,

01:57:15

on a Wednesday, you're gonna say,

01:57:17

those two hours devoted to Bookworm,

01:57:19

I should be quote unquote working with those hours.

01:57:22

I should be devoting those to ProCourse.

01:57:24

And I don't think that's a healthy attitude.

01:57:25

And I think that that is just an inevitable point

01:57:27

that people are going to get to if you ask this question.

01:57:31

You're gonna force them to make those compromises

01:57:34

between work and life.

01:57:37

And I don't like that term, work-life balance,

01:57:39

but at some point, you have to accept,

01:57:42

whether you are the CEO, the Scrum Master,

01:57:44

the product owner, whatever,

01:57:47

that this is the point where we can,

01:57:50

like this amount of hours, basically.

01:57:53

This is the maximum thing we can ask of people

01:57:57

without decreasing their happiness,

01:57:59

which is the next chapter.

01:58:02

And you're not gonna go past that.

01:58:03

Yeah, for sure.

01:58:05

Yeah, no, I can see how,

01:58:07

there's a lot of this, especially with the velocity side

01:58:09

of things where things can get out of hand.

01:58:11

Like you can really get focused on the wrong thing, for sure.

01:58:16

Especially with, I mean, let's just go ahead

01:58:18

and jump in here.

01:58:19

So chapter seven, happiness.

01:58:20

One of the key things,

01:58:22

'cause we talked about the wise fool already,

01:58:24

but another key aspect of this is the happiness metric.

01:58:28

And he mentions how during his Scrum meetings,

01:58:33

he would ask the question.

01:58:35

When you're asking the,

01:58:37

what should we start doing?

01:58:38

What should we stop doing?

01:58:39

What should we continue doing?

01:58:40

A follow up to that during those meetings would be,

01:58:43

how happy are you,

01:58:45

like on a scale of one to five,

01:58:47

how happy are you with your role in this company?

01:58:50

And also on the same scale,

01:58:51

how happy are you with the direction of the company?

01:58:54

And he refers to those as the happiness metric.

01:58:57

And then he actually takes those numbers

01:58:59

and plots them on graphs

01:59:00

and then compares them to his burn,

01:59:02

or to his velocity charts

01:59:05

in order to determine at what velocity can you operate at

01:59:10

and still keep people happy,

01:59:11

which kind of bugged me to some degree.

01:59:15

He's like, okay, so you are playing games

01:59:17

with how hard to push people and still keep them happy.

01:59:21

- And this assumes that people are going to feel

01:59:23

comfortable sharing if they are unhappy.

01:59:25

- Correct.

01:59:26

- Which I would argue that people

01:59:27

are not going to feel that way.

01:59:29

I never had qualms voicing my displeasure

01:59:34

when we were asked to do things that were,

01:59:36

that I considered cross the line.

01:59:39

It didn't happen hardly at all.

01:59:40

And if it happened for a season,

01:59:42

that was a choice I had to make,

01:59:45

but eventually disagree but commit,

01:59:47

I would go in with it and whatever.

01:59:49

I recognize this is a temporary thing.

01:59:51

But I would argue there's a ton of people

01:59:53

who would say the way we're working isn't working for me,

01:59:56

but I'm not going to say anything

01:59:57

'cause I'm afraid of losing my job.

01:59:58

- Yeah, yeah.

02:00:00

So I don't think, you know,

02:00:01

this is not a thing we do at ProCourse.

02:00:04

I don't ask this question,

02:00:05

at least not in those meetings.

02:00:07

You know, I have some follow ups

02:00:08

with each individual person outside of that team meeting.

02:00:13

And I try to make sure that those one-on-ones

02:00:16

are open to where I can learn that type of thing

02:00:20

and continue to keep everybody moving

02:00:22

in a way that's healthy for them.

02:00:25

You know, that's what I try to do.

02:00:27

I don't know if that's the right way to do it or not,

02:00:28

but trying to quantify it and then plot it against

02:00:31

how many story points can I get out of this person?

02:00:33

Like, that's just, it feels scummy to me.

02:00:36

- Yeah, it does, it does.

02:00:38

Now there's two sides to this though

02:00:41

because he also mentions in this chapter,

02:00:43

the happy bubbles and this is where people start to think,

02:00:46

we don't need to improve anymore,

02:00:48

we've earned a break, stuff like that.

02:00:50

I get that, I understand why that can be dangerous.

02:00:54

So you do want to constantly be looking for

02:00:57

the low hanging fruit and ways that you can improve.

02:01:00

But also I would argue that if you've just created

02:01:04

an awesome place to work,

02:01:06

where he says on page 159,

02:01:08

I want people to love coming to work.

02:01:09

Okay, so if you succeeded doing that,

02:01:12

that don't necessarily push them

02:01:14

because that's gonna have an adverse relationship

02:01:17

with the happiness like you mentioned.

02:01:19

It's not a question of if it will have an impact,

02:01:22

it's just a question of how much

02:01:23

it's going to have an impact.

02:01:25

And this is kind of tied to the scrumboard,

02:01:30

the different sections, which we should probably go over.

02:01:33

So if you are happy and you're asking these questions

02:01:38

with the happiness metric and you are happy doing the work,

02:01:43

then basically he says like,

02:01:44

this is the natural progression

02:01:46

that things are gonna go through.

02:01:47

You've got the backlog,

02:01:48

these are all things that you could be doing,

02:01:50

then you've got the things that are selected

02:01:52

or development or things that are to do.

02:01:54

And from there you take things,

02:01:56

you work on them, they're in progress.

02:01:59

Once they are ready to be reviewed,

02:02:01

they go into a review section,

02:02:03

and then when they're completed, they go to done.

02:02:05

And this is my interpretation of reading this section,

02:02:09

which I thought initially like it was kind of weird

02:02:11

that he talks about the scrumboard in this section.

02:02:13

But basically what he's saying is that when people are happy,

02:02:16

things will be moving from one column to the next

02:02:19

on a regular schedule.

02:02:22

You're not gonna have a whole bunch of things

02:02:25

sitting to be reviewed for several days at a time

02:02:30

because if everybody's happy and everybody's connected

02:02:32

with the vision behind the project that they're working on,

02:02:35

they're going to ship the thing.

02:02:37

They're going to get it to done.

02:02:38

They're gonna see that thing in review.

02:02:39

They're gonna jump in and review it

02:02:40

so that they can mark it off

02:02:41

because one of the key tenants of scrum

02:02:43

is that half done equals not done.

02:02:46

So you don't get half credit if you did eight story points

02:02:49

worth of work on a 13 story point issue.

02:02:53

You get zero story points credit for that

02:02:56

in the burn down chart and unless you ship

02:02:57

that 13 story point issue.

02:02:59

- Yes.

02:03:00

Now I kind of want to move on here to this last section

02:03:03

'cause I feel like if,

02:03:05

and I want to frame these two pieces here a little bit

02:03:07

because I feel like it'll tie together a lot of what we've been,

02:03:11

we've been talking about all these different aspects of scrum

02:03:15

and you mentioned the scrumboard here briefly,

02:03:18

but the last chapter here, it's chapter eight priorities

02:03:21

and he talks about two different things with,

02:03:24

one is the product owner, the other is backlog grooming.

02:03:27

And I'll let you kind of go through

02:03:28

the backlog grooming thing here in a little bit,

02:03:30

but the product owner is somebody who,

02:03:32

they're not the one doing the stories on the board.

02:03:37

They're the ones who are helping to nail down

02:03:41

which of the stories are more important

02:03:43

than the other that need to be done first.

02:03:45

Like they're the ones that help basically reorder

02:03:48

the stories that you have in your backlog

02:03:51

and get those in place.

02:03:53

And then they're also taking the results of your team's sprint,

02:03:58

reviewing them and a lot of times they're the ones

02:04:01

that are doing the actual demo with the clients

02:04:04

or with whoever your stakeholders are.

02:04:06

They are the ones that are helping set some

02:04:08

of the broader direction of the particular product itself,

02:04:11

thus product owner.

02:04:13

Now where this all kind of comes together is,

02:04:16

we've talked about stories,

02:04:18

you've got the story points assigned to those,

02:04:20

you have a backlog which is the full list

02:04:22

of all of those stories.

02:04:24

And when you put together your sprint,

02:04:25

you're essentially saying,

02:04:27

how many story points across this backlog can I handle

02:04:30

during this sprint?

02:04:32

So in our case, say it's 100 points,

02:04:35

we would select 100 points worth of backlog stories,

02:04:40

put it onto our active sprint

02:04:43

and then that is what we kick off and work on

02:04:47

throughout that next week.

02:04:48

And as we start working on one of those stories,

02:04:51

you move it to the center column,

02:04:53

it goes from to do to doing,

02:04:55

it's sitting in the in progress column.

02:04:59

And when we get it done, we move it to the done column.

02:05:01

And in our case, when it hits the done column,

02:05:03

that's a trigger to the product owner.

02:05:06

In some cases, it's me and sometimes it's our development

02:05:08

manager.

02:05:09

When it hits that done column,

02:05:10

that's a trigger to go contact the client and say,

02:05:12

hey, we got this thing done,

02:05:14

can you go take a look at it?

02:05:15

And then we get the feedback and then it goes back

02:05:17

into our backlog and it goes right back into the system.

02:05:19

So that's how we do things and it seems to work really well.

02:05:23

It's kind of the classic way of using Scrum,

02:05:26

but a lot of it's dependent on the backlog

02:05:29

being correct, Mike, awkward talking.

02:05:32

- Right, no, I like that.

02:05:33

I like that implementation.

02:05:35

The backlog grooming piece here,

02:05:38

this is something that we probably could spend

02:05:39

a whole lot of time on, but we won't.

02:05:41

(laughing)

02:05:42

I will just say that this is a really, really important.

02:05:45

As someone who had done the backlog grooming for the podcast

02:05:49

and for the blog at Asian Efficiency,

02:05:51

there is a disproportionate amount of time that is saved

02:05:56

by spending time upfront grooming the backlog

02:06:02

and making sure that the descriptions are as accurate

02:06:05

as they can be and really identifying that these are

02:06:08

the things that we need to be working on.

02:06:11

This is where he talks about the 80/20

02:06:14

and the minimum viable product where you just want

02:06:17

to get something out there and start getting some feedback

02:06:19

on it, but picking the right things to work on

02:06:22

is a very important job and you can't spend too much time

02:06:27

going through that, I would argue.

02:06:30

Now, obviously you can, there is a point

02:06:32

of diminishing returns, but even someone who is a high planner

02:06:35

like me, the tendency is to be like,

02:06:37

well, I know what I need to work on.

02:06:38

I'll just sit down to work.

02:06:39

No, no.

02:06:40

Groom the backlog.

02:06:42

(laughs)

02:06:43

Select the things before the sprint meeting

02:06:44

and then as a team, you can decide what are the things

02:06:47

that you are actually gonna be working on.

02:06:50

This is gonna provide a disproportionate amount of value

02:06:55

and it's one of the things that you can easily undervalue it,

02:07:00

especially if you've got a bunch of stuff

02:07:02

that you need to get done and you're putting an emphasis

02:07:05

on cranking up the velocity, this is another thing

02:07:07

that could suffer from that,

02:07:10

which is probably why I think he recommends

02:07:12

that you have somebody who's a product owner

02:07:14

who's not part of the team.

02:07:15

Correct.

02:07:16

We didn't have the luxury of doing that.

02:07:19

So maybe that solves a lot of those issues,

02:07:24

but I think for smaller teams,

02:07:26

you're never gonna have somebody who's just a product owner.

02:07:28

You are gonna be working in the sprint as well as on the sprint.

02:07:31

Yeah, which is hard 'cause I sit in that role

02:07:35

and I float between those, so yes,

02:07:38

I can say that that is hard, but at the same time,

02:07:41

what I found was I had to do a lot of,

02:07:44

and have to do a lot of the product owner roles

02:07:47

I need to do outside of our sprint calls.

02:07:49

Yep, exactly.

02:07:50

So I do a lot of, let me take a minute

02:07:52

and reflect on what the strategy of the businesses

02:07:55

and what our priorities are.

02:07:57

I have to think about that outside the call

02:07:59

and then do all my work there and then join the call

02:08:01

and just operate under the two hats of Scrum Master

02:08:04

and team member because I can't,

02:08:06

like it's too many hats to juggle on one scenario

02:08:09

is trying to fit all three of those in there.

02:08:11

So don't do that.

02:08:12

Yep, yeah.

02:08:13

I think this, actually looking back at my notes,

02:08:15

he mentions that the product owner should ideally spend

02:08:19

half their time working with the customers

02:08:21

and half the time working with the team.

02:08:23

So they're not spending any time working on the sprint.

02:08:25

Sure.

02:08:26

But they are responsible for what's on the backlog

02:08:29

and what order it's in.

02:08:30

This is where he talks about how you can't prioritize

02:08:34

everything.

02:08:35

Page 189, he has a quote from Frederick II of Prussia,

02:08:38

which I had not heard before, but I loved.

02:08:40

He says, "He who will defend everything defends nothing."

02:08:43

So that was pretty cool.

02:08:47

And this is also where the best advice

02:08:50

for getting rolling with Scrum comes in.

02:08:52

He said, "If you want to start implementing Scrum,

02:08:54

"the first thing you have to do is create a backlog

02:08:56

"and then get a team."

02:08:58

So that would be probably the place to end this.

02:09:02

Like if you were going to take everything

02:09:03

we've talked about today and just get rolling

02:09:05

with this creative backlog in a team.

02:09:08

One other thing I do want to mention,

02:09:10

'cause we've talked about it,

02:09:12

but not really addressed it specifically,

02:09:14

is the whole retrospective that kind of ties

02:09:16

into the previous chapter on happiness,

02:09:18

but really that retrospective,

02:09:20

that's the other piece I would add to the advice,

02:09:23

create a backlog, create a team,

02:09:24

and then have a retrospective

02:09:25

so you can get feedback from the team.

02:09:27

Figure out what are the things that you should

02:09:29

start doing, stop doing, keep doing,

02:09:31

what are the things that are going well,

02:09:32

what are the things that can improve

02:09:33

and simply by asking those questions,

02:09:36

you'll be able to remove a lot of the impediments

02:09:38

as you start to implement this.

02:09:40

- Yes, that's a good one.

02:09:42

I like that spot.

02:09:43

Action items?

02:09:44

- Sure.

02:09:45

So actually I guess I wrote down two,

02:09:49

but one of them is done already

02:09:50

and that is to dabble with Scrum and Nomine Focus.

02:09:53

So we were sharing screenshots back and forth

02:09:55

about the ways that we've implemented this.

02:09:57

I haven't found a way that I really like yet.

02:09:59

I'll just talk about what I've done so far

02:10:01

and people have better ideas,

02:10:02

absolutely send them via the Bookworm Club.

02:10:05

But I created tags and I made a master tag of Scrum

02:10:10

and then I put backlog to do in progress, review,

02:10:13

and done as sub tags underneath that.

02:10:16

So then I created a custom perspective,

02:10:21

which is going to group individual actions by tag

02:10:25

and it's going to only show things

02:10:26

that have one of the last four of those.

02:10:29

So it's not going to show things that are in the backlog.

02:10:31

That tag is actually on hold.

02:10:33

So those are things that I'm not able to work on yet.

02:10:36

And then the custom perspective shows things

02:10:38

that are broken down by those different sections

02:10:42

and it's also going to show all the other tags

02:10:44

that are associated with it.

02:10:46

You don't have the ability to focus on just the Scrum tags,

02:10:48

but once you go to the custom perspective,

02:10:50

you can click on Scrum and then you see just those sections

02:10:54

if that makes sense.

02:10:56

And I kind of like that.

02:10:58

The problem is that they're not, they're vertical,

02:11:01

they're not horizontal.

02:11:02

So things don't move from left to right,

02:11:04

they move from top to bottom.

02:11:06

So I'm not sure I really like that.

02:11:08

I also created a planning perspective

02:11:10

which just has things that have the backlog tag.

02:11:13

And so I can go to that perspective,

02:11:15

look at the things in the backlog

02:11:16

and then select things based on the story points,

02:11:19

which is a whole nother tag, a whole series of tags.

02:11:21

I set up story points to be worked on.

02:11:24

I have no idea if this is actually going to work.

02:11:27

I had this idea in the shower this morning

02:11:29

as I was thinking about recording this episode.

02:11:30

I'm like, man, I really like Scrum.

02:11:32

I wish there was a way to implement it using OmniFocus

02:11:35

and I'm like, oh, tags,

02:11:36

I bet I could rig up some custom perspectives to do this.

02:11:39

And I'm not super happy with the way they're at right now,

02:11:41

but we'll see if this sticks.

02:11:44

The other action item that I mentioned earlier was,

02:11:47

and this is a long-term one,

02:11:48

so definitely not, I'm not promising this by episode 60.

02:11:52

- You got one month.

02:11:53

- Not happening.

02:11:54

But work four days a week,

02:11:56

just create a regular work rhythm

02:11:58

where Fridays are going to be set aside

02:12:00

for thinking, family, and I don't know, whatever else.

02:12:02

I need to put some time into figuring out

02:12:06

what that day is going to be,

02:12:07

'cause I don't just want it to be a day where I do nothing.

02:12:09

I want it to be intentional.

02:12:11

I just haven't figured out exactly

02:12:12

what's going to happen there yet.

02:12:14

- Well, I'm not going to work four days a week,

02:12:15

but I will try to do Scrum via OmniFocus

02:12:19

and do it personally.

02:12:20

And I did this, I did some setup on mine

02:12:23

over this past weekend.

02:12:25

So I've actually been running this for a few days now

02:12:28

with quite a bit of success.

02:12:30

But what I did, as opposed to the way that you did it,

02:12:34

is I created a tag called Sprint.

02:12:37

And what I did on Sunday was go through all of the tasks

02:12:42

that are remaining in my system

02:12:44

and tagged the ones Sprint

02:12:47

that I felt like I needed to get done this week.

02:12:51

But I also assigned them story points,

02:12:53

but I didn't name them,

02:12:54

it looks like your tags are called one SP or three SP,

02:12:59

five SP and so on.

02:13:00

I just used the number because I'm a nerd

02:13:04

and wrote a script for it.

02:13:06

And I can tag it with the number itself

02:13:11

and then I wrote a script.

02:13:12

And so I have a,

02:13:14

I don't think I've ever mentioned this on the show,

02:13:16

but I have a GitHub repository for the scripts

02:13:19

that I use on a regular basis.

02:13:22

So I'll get a link to that in the show notes,

02:13:24

but it's OF scripts.

02:13:25

You can search GitHub for OF scripts and get there.

02:13:29

And I'll make sure this is loaded,

02:13:30

the script is loaded onto that repository

02:13:33

before this episode goes live.

02:13:35

But all that the script does is it's,

02:13:38

of all the tasks that you select in OmniFocus,

02:13:41

it loops through all the tags on all of those tasks

02:13:44

and then adds up any of them that are numbers

02:13:47

and tells you how many there are,

02:13:49

like what the count is on those.

02:13:51

So what you can do is you can tag things, sprint,

02:13:54

select the tag, sprint and give those all the,

02:13:57

you know, the number of story points you want them to have

02:13:59

and then select them all and run the script

02:14:01

and it'll tell you how many points are there.

02:14:03

That's all it does.

02:14:04

Super handy, but it means that if I want to set a goal

02:14:07

for a hundred story points in a week,

02:14:09

it's easy for me to get a view of,

02:14:11

do I have that assigned or not?

02:14:13

Which, you know, that's what I decided on.

02:14:15

I was deciding I was going to do a hundred points in a week.

02:14:18

And you'll notice Mike, the screenshot I sent you says 123

02:14:21

point five story points, which means that when I ran that,

02:14:24

I realized, oh, crud.

02:14:26

(laughs)

02:14:27

I'm not gonna be able to do that this week.

02:14:29

(laughs)

02:14:30

I like that, that's too much.

02:14:31

So it was an immediate indicator to me that that wouldn't work.

02:14:35

But some of the structure I've got around this is

02:14:38

that there's really three levels of tasks

02:14:41

that I maintain in OmniFocus at the moment.

02:14:43

One is the sprint level, the ones I've committed

02:14:46

to doing this week in my sprint.

02:14:48

I've got the ones that are in the system,

02:14:50

but they're not allocated to that sprint tag.

02:14:53

They're not a part of the current sprint,

02:14:54

but I've committed to doing them.

02:14:56

It's just not gonna happen this week.

02:14:59

And then I have my someday maybes

02:15:00

that I haven't committed to.

02:15:01

Their ideas are things I might do at some point in the future,

02:15:04

but I've not made a commitment to acting on them quite yet.

02:15:08

So that's where I have those three levels,

02:15:09

which is kind of nice,

02:15:11

'cause it means that I can create a perspective

02:15:13

around that sprint tag and see all of the ones

02:15:16

that I'm planning to do this week

02:15:18

and just work towards completing that throughout the week,

02:15:20

which is kind of handy.

02:15:22

So it's not super complex.

02:15:25

Again, it's just using the one sprint tag

02:15:27

and then the story point tags and you're done.

02:15:29

That's all that that does.

02:15:31

So anyway, there you go.

02:15:33

That's what I'm playing with.

02:15:35

It's kind of an experiment right now,

02:15:37

but I will say it's giving me just enough structure

02:15:40

and enough freedom that I've been really enjoying it this week.

02:15:43

Granted, it's still new and shiny.

02:15:45

We'll see how it pans out over the next two or three weeks,

02:15:47

especially with Thanksgiving here next week.

02:15:50

So we'll see how it all works over the long run,

02:15:53

but that's what I'm currently doing.

02:15:54

- Nice.

02:15:55

Author's style and rating?

02:15:57

- Yeah.

02:15:59

You wanna go first?

02:15:59

You want me to?

02:16:00

- Well, I'll go.

02:16:02

I found that review.

02:16:03

It's the most helpful, negative review.

02:16:06

It's two stars and it says,

02:16:07

"Dang buddy, save some ego for the rest of us."

02:16:09

(laughing)

02:16:11

Says, "If I had a nickel for every time he calls someone

02:16:13

"or something stupid, I'd have at least $100.

02:16:16

"His ego rivals Kanye West and Donald Trump.

02:16:19

"Most of the book is, 'This is why I am the best.

02:16:21

"'This is why I know more than you.

02:16:22

"'If they listen to me, they'd still be a business.

02:16:24

"'If you don't apply a scrum, you're stupid.

02:16:26

"'Like dang buddy, save some ego for the rest of us.'"

02:16:29

The scrum system he developed,

02:16:31

genuinely seems like it's helpful

02:16:33

in applying it to our everyday work will be beneficial,

02:16:35

which is why I gave it two stars.

02:16:36

But every chapter he says,

02:16:37

I'll explain more about scrum later,

02:16:38

which is annoying considering I was reading this book

02:16:41

to learn about scrum,

02:16:42

not about the Almighty Sutherland achievements.

02:16:45

The process seems efficient,

02:16:46

but the writing is obnoxious.

02:16:47

If you had written a two-page manual about applying scrum,

02:16:49

he would have accomplished twice the work in half the time.

02:16:51

(laughing)

02:16:53

I agree 100% with this review.

02:16:55

Well, I should say 95%

02:16:58

because I don't agree with the two star rating.

02:16:59

I think there's a lot of good stuff in here.

02:17:02

But I will definitely agree with that assessment

02:17:05

of the author's style, definitely got annoying.

02:17:07

I think it's a four star book.

02:17:09

I think there's some great stuff in here.

02:17:11

I do think that criticism of when he says,

02:17:14

I'll explain more about scrum later is valid.

02:17:17

We talked a lot about scrum,

02:17:19

but we didn't get to the specifics.

02:17:21

And that's kind of the feeling you get

02:17:22

from reading this book as well.

02:17:23

So maybe it's an accurate presentation was in the book.

02:17:26

(laughing)

02:17:28

This definitely gets you excited about scrum,

02:17:30

but when you get done, you do still have questions about,

02:17:33

okay, so how do I actually hold a sprint meeting?

02:17:36

How should I groom my backlog, stuff like that?

02:17:39

And there's a lot of ways that you can do that

02:17:41

and there's other books for that.

02:17:42

But it's kind of weird that the co-creator of scrum

02:17:46

and the savior of the universe

02:17:48

doesn't explain how to do it.

02:17:50

So yeah, four stars because there's some great,

02:17:55

great principles in here, but you could definitely,

02:17:59

I definitely get why this guy knocked off more than that.

02:18:01

And I was tempted to do the same.

02:18:04

(laughing)

02:18:06

- Yeah, I'll join you at four.

02:18:08

I definitely agree, if you wanna learn

02:18:11

how to implement agile, specifically scrum

02:18:15

in your specific scenario, this is not the book,

02:18:20

which is weird to say.

02:18:22

- But it's a great intro.

02:18:23

Like if you've never heard a scrum before,

02:18:25

this is the thing to read.

02:18:26

But if you have heard about scrum,

02:18:27

you know what a product owner is

02:18:29

and you wanna take it to the next level,

02:18:30

this one's not worth your time.

02:18:32

- Yes, yeah, if you know the mechanics of scrum

02:18:35

and such, this is not for you,

02:18:38

which is why I would put it for,

02:18:40

like you would expect this to say,

02:18:42

here's how scrum came about,

02:18:44

here's how to implement it in detail

02:18:49

without overdoing it,

02:18:50

and then show how it could be used

02:18:53

both in and out of software development.

02:18:55

Like that would be my expectation here.

02:18:58

But really what you get through this

02:19:01

is a lot of the why behind each of the pieces,

02:19:04

which is interesting, but I don't feel like

02:19:07

that was where I expected this to go.

02:19:10

- Yep.

02:19:11

- Percet, like again, it's helpful,

02:19:12

but he never sits down and goes through the whole,

02:19:16

what is scrum.

02:19:17

Like he tells you what it is from a high level,

02:19:20

but he actually doesn't tell you what the process is.

02:19:24

He never goes through that.

02:19:25

- Yeah, so interesting anecdote.

02:19:28

You know, when I first read this book,

02:19:30

when I quote unquote, Reddit,

02:19:31

I read it in an audible format

02:19:33

when I first joined the Asian efficiency team.

02:19:36

And I listened to it and I'm like, okay,

02:19:37

I know what scrum is.

02:19:39

And then I've been working with the Asian efficiency team

02:19:42

been using scrum for the last several years.

02:19:43

I go back and read it now and I'm like,

02:19:45

oh, I had no idea what scrum was.

02:19:48

- Yeah. (laughs)

02:19:50

- So totally different perspective

02:19:51

after reading it the second time.

02:19:53

- Sure, sure.

02:19:55

And I will say like, so at pro-course,

02:19:57

we've been implementing this

02:19:59

and slowly bringing up more and more pieces of it.

02:20:02

And that's still a fairly new thing to us.

02:20:05

So this was good timing that, you know,

02:20:08

we were reading this 'cause it's kind of a good refresher

02:20:10

to me 'cause I know a lot of the pieces to it.

02:20:12

It just hadn't, you know,

02:20:14

I've not read this previously.

02:20:15

I studied it through other means.

02:20:18

So it was super helpful to do this at this time.

02:20:20

So it was a good timing for me at least.

02:20:22

So thanks, Mike.

02:20:24

- For sure.

02:20:24

Thank you Bookworm listeners who recommended this.

02:20:27

- Oh yeah, it was a recommendation.

02:20:28

I forgot that.

02:20:29

- Yep.

02:20:30

So I've got a get book and that is platform

02:20:33

by Michael Hyatt for people who are interested

02:20:36

in following along with that.

02:20:38

And then we've got a couple of books

02:20:39

that are upcoming here.

02:20:40

The next one is your choice.

02:20:41

- Yeah, so the next one up, so episode 59

02:20:45

will be by our friend Atul Gawande being mortal.

02:20:50

I've started in on this one.

02:20:53

I'm very interested in our conversation.

02:20:55

It is worlds apart from what we just went through.

02:20:58

(laughing)

02:20:59

- Nice.

02:21:00

- So.

02:21:01

- Refreshing change of pace.

02:21:02

- Yeah, it has to do with our medical system

02:21:04

and how we approach end of life scenarios in our families.

02:21:09

So very interesting.

02:21:13

Might get a little morbid here and there

02:21:14

in our conversation,

02:21:15

but I think it'll be for the better in the long run.

02:21:17

So it'll be a very interesting conversation.

02:21:19

- All right.

02:21:20

The one after that, my wife is making me pick.

02:21:23

And that is the one thing by Gary Keller and Jay Popison.

02:21:26

Back in, was it episode 50?

02:21:28

We did the draft.

02:21:29

I mentioned this was my number one pick.

02:21:32

And she was asking me, what book should I read next?

02:21:36

I was looking at the things on my bookshelf

02:21:38

and I gave her that one.

02:21:39

She's loving it and she's like,

02:21:40

"Oh my gosh, you have to do this one for Bookworm."

02:21:42

(laughing)

02:21:43

- Okay.

02:21:44

I've not read it, so this will be good.

02:21:46

- It is a really good book.

02:21:47

It'll be interesting to see if it's as good as I remember it

02:21:50

because I haven't read it now in a couple of years.

02:21:53

But it's, so the one thing by Gary Keller and Jay Popison,

02:21:56

that's the next one for me.

02:21:58

- All right.

02:21:59

So no pressure, but as your number one pick,

02:22:02

that meant it was above some five star books.

02:22:06

- I know, I know.

02:22:07

- Which means I fully expect you to rate it at five stars.

02:22:10

And if you don't.

02:22:10

- I'm a little bit nervous.

02:22:12

(laughing)

02:22:14

I kind of feel like I have to.

02:22:15

But no, I'll be honest about it.

02:22:19

If I am remembering it through Rose Colored Glasses

02:22:22

and I see a whole bunch of things that I don't like about it,

02:22:25

I'll rate it lower than that.

02:22:26

- Sure.

02:22:27

- What I mentioned in the draft episode was that these ratings,

02:22:30

it's interesting to see like the impression we have

02:22:32

right after we get done reading the book

02:22:33

and the impression six months a year from now.

02:22:36

In fact, on the club, there was somebody asking about

02:22:39

how to read a book by Mortimer Adler.

02:22:41

And that was not a book that I particularly enjoyed,

02:22:43

but I responded to that comment and I said,

02:22:45

you know, it's interesting how this book has shaped

02:22:48

the way that I approach books and the way that I take notes

02:22:51

and all of that.

02:22:52

I recognize now that that book did have a pretty profound

02:22:55

impact on me, even though at the time,

02:22:57

maybe I thought it was a little bit boring.

02:22:59

- Yeah, yeah, it's crazy how that particular book,

02:23:04

like it's still a part of some of my own notes that I take

02:23:08

for these books that we go through.

02:23:11

Like it definitely impacts the outline that I keep,

02:23:14

like the note structure that I keep for myself.

02:23:16

So it's interesting how that one's had a big impact,

02:23:18

even though I don't think either one of us really liked it.

02:23:20

So yeah, interesting.

02:23:23

- Got to eat your vegetables.

02:23:24

- Yep, that's the way it goes.

02:23:26

So that said, Scrum was a book recommendation.

02:23:31

It was recommended to us on our Bookworm Club.

02:23:35

Very highly rated or voted,

02:23:38

which is why Mike selected it.

02:23:40

So if you have a book that you would like

02:23:42

to put into the running for that,

02:23:45

you can do that on club.bookworm.fm.

02:23:48

There's a big button at the top that says recommend.

02:23:51

Click it.

02:23:52

Make sure you have an account on the club, click it.

02:23:54

And then you can tell us what your book is

02:23:55

that you would like to see us go through.

02:23:58

At the same time,

02:23:59

you can click the recommendations category that's there.

02:24:02

It's pretty easy to see that as well.

02:24:03

And you can see all of the other books

02:24:05

that have been recommended.

02:24:06

Go leave your vote on them.

02:24:07

Like let us know which ones you would like us to go through

02:24:09

'cause other people have recommended them as well.

02:24:11

So you can leave your vote on those as well

02:24:14

and see what's potentially coming up.

02:24:17

- All right.

02:24:17

And if you want to help out the show,

02:24:19

please go to iTunes and leave us a rating and review.

02:24:23

I've mentioned before,

02:24:24

I want to be the number one return, not KCRW.

02:24:27

I just got salt in the wound the other day

02:24:29

because somebody messaged us on the bookworm club

02:24:31

and said, I love bookworm by KCRW.

02:24:34

I want you to come on the show

02:24:35

and I'm like wrong bookworm people.

02:24:37

(laughs)

02:24:39

- This is how excited we were about that.

02:24:41

Neither one of us even acknowledged that it existed.

02:24:44

(laughs)

02:24:47

- Well, I haven't had time to respond, but I will.

02:24:50

I do want to call out,

02:24:51

we've got a couple reviews here though.

02:24:53

I'm just going to read one of them.

02:24:54

It says, I recently discovered bookworm

02:24:55

have been catching up on past episodes all week long.

02:24:58

Whether you read each book or not,

02:24:59

Mike and Joe's takeaways are often full of wisdom.

02:25:01

Not sure about that, but thanks.

02:25:03

And their approach to reading this genre

02:25:05

is great to learn from.

02:25:06

I never thought to actually write down action items

02:25:08

from a book and review my progress on them.

02:25:09

Keep up the great work, Mike and Joe.

02:25:11

That is from web1032,

02:25:13

says a wonderful and inspiring podcast, Five Stars.

02:25:16

So thank you so much for that review.

02:25:17

On the topic of writing down the action items,

02:25:20

you can do that on the club.

02:25:22

We would love to see how you are implementing

02:25:25

what you read about as you read these books along with us.

02:25:28

So go over to club.bookworm.fm to sign up

02:25:31

and share your action items there.

02:25:33

- Yeah, 'cause Mike and I get to share ours with each other

02:25:35

and see how quickly Mike gets down to four days a week.

02:25:39

We get to share that and keep each other accountable,

02:25:41

but if you don't have someone that you get to do that with,

02:25:45

you can use the bookworm community for that.

02:25:46

So it can be a great way to get that.

02:25:48

- Come hang out with us.

02:25:49

Podcast book club for the win.

02:25:50

- Yeah, woo hoo.

02:25:51

Go team.

02:25:52

So yes, that said, let's gear up for our next book,

02:25:56

which is Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.

02:25:59

And we'll go through that one in episode 59.