agileadhd

[agileadhd]

A pattern shift

Last week, after about five or six weeks of applying Agile and Scrum to our household life, Francis said in one daily stand-up: “I think I’m having a pattern shift.”

What he meant was, he was beginning to trust the system we’ve set up. We’ve been at it a while and it keeps being adapted and improved. Francis’s ideas for ways of working on something, or tasks to get done, are easily and promptly absorbed and acted on. 

A couple of days later, he asked, “Does this mean that nothing will sneak up on me?” He’d noticed nothing had really taken him by surprise for the last few weeks, which made a change. And it’s true, looking ahead in two week chunks is giving us the chance to have fewer last-minute crises. “But surely I can still miss planning for the long-term stuff?” he said. But no, he answered himself - the backlog, with its regularly-reviewed, categorised piles of post-it notes, should let us prioritise and aim for goals no matter how large or distant.

For Francis, and probably anyone with ADHD, this feeling of believing that what you want to make happen could be made to actually happen just doesn���t exist. It occurred to me that I am so used to my belief that I could achieve big goals if I want to that it has become a kind of bedrock for all my actions and decisions. Living without it must be like having the land shift under you all the time. I am so happy that this system is beginning to give Francis that stability he has been unable to find (and I have been unable to provide) any other way.

He says it is still too early to *really* trust it yet, but given that the imperfect consistency we’ve been able to maintain so far is already eroding his negative beliefs about the future, I’m full of hope for how far we could come in a year or more of applying it.

Caption: Francis lifting our dog out of a scrape on Ilkley moor. She can jump onto bigger rocks than she can get down from. 

[agileadhd]

Adaptations so far

We just finished our third two-week sprint, meaning we’re already a month and a half in to this Agile experiment. We’ve been going strong, despite my lack of posts. Partly that’s because we’ve been away to lovely places like this:

Agile is supposed to be all about ‘inspecting and adapting’, and I can say we’ve been doing that nearly every day. Instead of going over all the tasks we’ve done, I’ll run through a list of all the adaptations we’ve already made to our initial Agile system:

- Made a ‘Definition of Ready’:

This gives us a guide for when a task on a post-it note task is ready to be part of a sprint. It has really helped us notice if something needs to be broken down a bit more. 

- Given up on a ‘Definition of Done’ (for now)

This is supposed to tell you when a task is definitely done, along with acceptance criteria. However, I think this works better with coding. Since we have such a variety of tasks we don’t yet have any ‘finishing criteria’ in common for everything.

- Started a new ‘health’ section (yellow category)

In the picture above, you can see we still have the yellow post-it note without a theme. After a few days of the first sprint, Francis agreed to my suggestion of making it ‘Health’ (physical and mental). This now exhausts our supply of different colours for post-it notes, but for now these categories seem to be enough. :)

- Had to start pinning every post-it note because they kept falling down!

Meaning we are now in desperate need of more pins...

- Replaced our ‘burn-down chart’ with a ‘burn-up thermometer’

This is actually our second attempt at a burn-down chart (first time had no measuring, and therefore was pretty much useless). You can see it petered out before the end of the sprint too. 

For the second sprint, we decided we could do with something better. Francis had the idea of going up instead of down as being more satisfying, and I executed it on the first night of the sprint using a pizza box. As you can see, it’s beautiful.

We then write each day’s points on with pencil as we go, so we can stay accurate. This is how it was at the end of the third sprint (as you can see, we exceeded our target):

We can then rub out the points on the right and re-adjust the scale to reflect our current capacity.

- Made our ‘refine backlog’ session for one category at a time

According to Agile lore (or just my training), each sprint should leave about 10% of the time available to refine the backlog of tasks which are yet to do. We improvised a table (as our actual tables are so messy) from a board I have for art projects, balanced on the top of the piano seat. Then we take each colour (category) of post-it notes down from the ‘product backlog’ and spread them out. We had one mammoth session where we tackled all five different colours one after another, but given the high mental effort required anyway, we’ve decided that’s just too much. So now we’re doing just one category each ‘refining session’, meaning we’ll be covering all of them every 10 weeks.

- Started a ‘sprint log’ notebook

At our first retrospective, we decided we needed a way to conserve the achievements of each sprint. So we’ve taken one of my favourite new notebooks for this noble task:

- Established ‘regular’ tasks and how they work

In our first sprint we had a bit of confusion about whether to include ‘housework’ tasks in the sprint. From the second one we integrated them properly, starting to turn things into systems. Obviously that involves repeating elements, so we’ve stuck in ‘regular’ sections in the sprint backlog. These started as being ‘Daily’, ‘Weekly’ and ‘Once a sprint’ (so fortnightly), with tasks less regular than these kept separately in the far right column under ‘established systems’.

- Initiated a new regular category of ‘sporadic’

After a few days of this I instituted the regular category ‘sporadic’ for tasks which are done every two to three days, which has worked very well.

- Made a multiplier bonus if the ‘in progress’ column gets cleared

In the direction of making things more ‘gamified’ and fun, we decided to add a bonus ‘multiplier’ for clearing the tasks planned for the day. If the ‘In progress’ column gets cleared of the planned tasks, then every other task done that day is worth double points. So far this has worked as clearing all of your tasks is quite hard and we rarely manage it, plus many extra ones.

- Made a multiplier bonus for not drinking

More recently, we’ve experimented with including a task for ‘Not drinking alcohol’ (officially a daily), given it 8 story points’ worth on its own, plus given it a bonus of multiplying everything else done that day by 1.1. The idea is that for each consecutive day this is achieved, the multiplier will become 1.2, 1.3, etc...

- Started putting less per day in the ‘in progress’ section

The problem with putting ALL the dailies into the ‘in progress’ section is that the day ahead appears very cluttered and intimidating. Also it’s very hard to ever get the clearing-day bonus.

- Used bull-dog clips to hold each category backlog

For when pins aren’t quite enough.

- Used white post-it notes as ‘meta’ tasks about improving the system

Because they match the titles of the columns.

- Used light blue post-it notes for ‘calendar’ tasks

We’ve now split the planning process of the sprint into two, starting by checking the calendar and making tasks based on events happening in the next two weeks.

- Widened the sprint backlog column and shrunk the product backlog one

This old photo shows that we started with the ‘Next’ column (i.e. what’s happening in this sprint) as narrower than the ‘product backlog’. This quickly stopped making sense, so we moved the dividing ribbon a bit to the left.

- Divided the ‘Done’ section into ‘done that day’ and ‘done this sprint’

This makes it easier to count the ones towards this time on the burndown chart, and also after being counted up the regulars can be returned to the ‘Daily’, ‘Weekly’ sections.

- Started a ‘treasure box’ for holding past done post-it notes

Rather than throw out the details of all the work we’ve done, the non-regular tasks get stored in a nice wooden box, like treasure. I think this helps hopefully to see them visually building up and how far we’ve come.

- Stopped using Planning Poker “properly”

Officially we should vote independently each time we estimate a task, but in fact as each gets made, one of us suggests a number (still using the loose fibonacci sequence of 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, etc.) and the other either agrees or disagrees. With only two of us this works fine.

- Made a kitchen cleaning rota

It’s not like I hadn’t thought of starting something like this before, but this idea arose naturally from the large number of different kitchen-cleaning daily post-it notes we were trying to find room for on the board. Francis suggested it, and we developed the system you see below on the fridge. On the board we simply have one daily post-it note called ‘Kitchen cleaning’ which is worth 5 (averaged from the previous ones), plus one more which is ‘Unload/Reload’ dishwasher.

- Made a food shopping system

Along similar lines, we have now thought through four regular post-it notes and scheduled it into the Google calendar for sprintly shopping.

[agileadhd]

Wooo! Big win today - look at our lovely new task radiator! :D

So we’ve had two more daily scrums - one even at my parents’ house. Francis had a dip in motivation yesterday but still the daily scrum is like magic - that little 5 minute easy talk about what we’ve done or are going to do is enough to refocus both of us. Today the daily scrum again moved naturally into doing something direct afterwards - getting the board up, which we had budgeted a whole week for. It was me driving that to begin with, but by the time we had screwed it up (surprisingly easy and enjoyable) Francis said he was really glad we’d done it. There was a real air of celebration at such a visible leap forward.

We are now roughly a full week ahead of schedule as I have gone straight on this evening to outline our task radiator. Francis has gone out for the evening so I’m really excited to see what he thinks of it. :) As he says, now we can see! Plus 25 productivity points!

[agileadhd]

First daily scrum!

Tonight we had our first daily scrum. I was late - I’d thought 6pm would be late enough for me to get back from work but 6pm actually found me still 10 minutes out, stuck in the rain on my bike. (We’ve changed the time to 6.30pm from now on.)

Pretty much as soon as I got home, we stood up in the middle of our living room to have the daily scrum and it was very natural, as Francis was already wanting to tell me all about his day and what he’d done. I just ran through very briefly the questions we needed to answer:

What did you do today?

What do you plan on doing tomorrow?

What are the impediments currently stopping you?

It turns out he had already made great progress towards getting the board up on the wall - he’d cleared the stuff already on the pinboard, cleared the stuff all around and underneath where we’re going to put the pinboard (including driving a load of stuff to the charity shop), and attempted to start measuring out the holes, but realised it was a two-person job. On top of this, he had also walked the dog, tidied his desk a bit, run a light load on the dishwasher AND done a load of laundry. 

We agreed our main impediment right now is that we don’t have a task radiator to visualise what we need to get done. It’s a catch-22 because that is exactly what we are working on right now! But Francis put it like this: ‘This very first time we’re flying blind - we just have to stumble through the darkness not being able to see the tasks we’re supposed to be doing, so that after this we’ll always have it.’ So even with this much (i.e. not that much) direction, and a relatively straightforward physical task to do, there’s already been a definite surge in motivation - significant compared with the levels of motivation Francis has had for the last several months. It’s infectious too - we went straight on to measure the hole positions together, and I am going to be snatching time at work to plan out how I will design the Task Radiator columns for the board.

One last thing before I go to bed - it’s interesting to me that when faced with my suggestions for ideas of directions for him to pursue in regard to his music business, he has complained that each individual task seems hopeless as it does not connect in his mind to a long-term future where it could ever actually work. But with this, even though this whole task we’re working towards is only a proto-step in getting the real work done, he perceives the underlying point of it and has at least some faith in the structures we’re learning to make real and lasting change. I am just going to do my best to keep the small changes going and keep the consistency.

[agileadhd]

So yesterday we finally got to doing a Sprint Planning Meeting. 

We both downloaded the app ‘Planning Poker’ (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leanify.planning.poker&hl=en - most popular version on Google Play), and I did a quick Google and followed the hints from this cheatsheet: https://www.leadingagile.com/2012/08/simple-cheat-sheet-to-sprint-planning-meeting/.

We started by adding some acceptance criteria to the back of the two story post-its, but it really made more sense to go straight to breaking it up into tasks. 

We broke up the bigger story into however many tasks we could think of (seen here on the torn halves of the pink post-it notes). This was pretty easy as they’re both simple, physical tasks, but there were more tasks than I thought there would be. We just kept adding them as they occurred, even to the very end of the meeting.

Then came the estimating. Francis picked out ‘Screw to wall’ as the medium, ‘Goldilocks’ task of not too big or too small. I made this a 5 and we judged the rest as relative effort based on that. We got into using the planning poker cards very easily - voting brought up some differences of opinion, which led naturally to some debate and then a revote, picking the higher number if there was still a slight discrepancy.

I explained what a ‘Spike’ is - the product of which is only knowledge, not actual progress as such - and we assigned a couple of tasks to me as we came across ones which Francis thought would take him masses of effort (and I would find quite easy). Otherwise, we haven’t assigned anything yet. We also briefly covered the Definition of Done but didn’t write anything on it.

It’s a good thing these tasks are about getting a Task Radiator started because we’re sorely missing a place to put all these tasks! You can see how messy our table is - we’re using the only flat surface to write these down. When it came to eating dinner after this, we had to stack the post-it notes on top of their relevant story. Francis already got the idea that this is the exact opposite of what we’re meant to do with them, though! And he can now see why getting the board up is the essential prerequisite for getting real projects underway.

Finally, we sorted out a time to do our Daily Scrums. We chose 6pm, as I’ll definitely be home from work by then. Obviously, the place will always be at home. Our first one is this evening, after which I’ll update! :)

[agileadhd]

In the third session, a couple of nights later, we prioritised the four main stories using ‘MoSCoW’ - Must, Should, Could and Won’t. Must is something that has to be done for the ‘Minimum Usable SubseT’ - it won’t work without it. Shoulds are things which you can manage without, but the work-around is nasty and will cause a lot of pain in the system. Coulds are things which would add value, but are really just extras. And Won’ts are things you decide not to do.

We decided the only true Must was to have a Task Radiator - the chart where we will be able to see all our tasks, which is crucial to making Scrum work (Big Visible Charts is an official acronym). However, when thinking about it, getting the board with the chart on it up on the wall is less important, as there is a work-around - we could just have it leaning against the wall.

We ended with one Must, two Shoulds and a Could, which actually fits the aim of less than 60% Must Effort - here we have three and a half weeks’ total effort (with the T-shirt sizes from last time), and one week’s worth is a Must. (I didn’t go over this in the actual meeting though.)

The only other part of this meeting was to outline how sprints work - Francis chose 2-week sprints, and that meant we had to choose two out of four of our user stories to fit (as we’d estimated around a week for each). All I said about sprints was basically that they’re repeating timeboxes from a week long to a month long - I didn’t go into the official Events etc that sprints consist of.

[agileadhd]

The training at my software development grad scheme started with three days all about Agile methodologies - in particular, Scrum. As I learnt about it, I realised that it made a lot of sense. Finally, the process by which these organisations actually organise themselves was revealed. It was pleasing, logical, practical. And at the same time, I thought of the research showing that people with ADHD flourish best when their environment is highly structured. Short of emulating the army, I didn’t know until then how that might be done. Finally, here it is - a potential, ready-made, tested and accepted solution. 

So I came home and suggested to my fiance Francis that we give it a go. Luckily, although sometimes resistant to reading books which I suggest, for this he was pretty open to the idea. 

I started by drawing the two graphs you can see on the paper - the ‘J curve’ simply shows the expected disruption to performance when making any sort of change - essentially, things get worse before they get better. So hopefully that makes the point that even though things will seem much harder after a short while, it will be worth sticking with it.

The second graph shows the ‘iron triangle of constraints’: time, resources (money and effort/motivation), and scope (how many things you actually do), with quality in the middle. The ideology of Agile states that we should fix the amount of time, resources and quality we give to a project, but leave the scope of what is actually achieved on that project as flexible. If something has to give, it’s an extra feature, not how long it will take.

I then sketched out the shape of a ‘User Story’ (on the paper on the left) and we started putting down some to-do list items for a ‘proto sprint’ about getting Agile initially set up in our house. Basically, there’s sticking the board on the wall, making that board into a ‘task radiator’, teaching Francis more about Scrum, and fixing the timing for events like the Daily Scrum.

That was all we did on that first evening. It was at least two or three days later before I found five minutes to spend on the next stage - estimating effort very roughly using ‘T-shirt sizes’. This works very simply:

S - 1 week

M - 2 weeks

L - 4 weeks

XL - 8 weeks

We invented a category of ‘XS’ for ‘less than a week’. You can see our estimates written onto each user story (on our fetching Oxfam ‘Goat Notes’ post-it notes).