As you can see, I have not been able to keep up with the pace of all of my writing commitments. The good news is that I have still managed to shuffle all of the little people in my life to where they needed to go, and get them fed in the process (yes, sometimes while shuffling them, crazy right?). Like all ambitious projects, there comes a time where the shiny newness has worn off, and now its time to do the actual work. This has been my last Sprint - Sprint "Solo Daddy".
My wife was in China last Sprint for 10 days for a Bioinformatics Conference where basically really smart people go to run their brains together in hopes of spawning even more brainy brain children. This left me with running the household, which was not that bad actually, but it was a lot of balls to keep in the air. Almost immediately after she got back one of my best friend's youngest child had an emergency and had to be hospitalized for a week (he is better now - yeah!). I stepped in as House Dad and helped take his eldest daughter to and from school and had her over at my house after school in order to allow time for him to visit his family in the hospital. All really good things I am happy and proud to have done, but they pretty much drove a big 'ole fire truck through my carefully planned schedules and tasks.
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| Is it over yet? |
In short, life happened, and I had to Sprint just to keep up. As a result several of my tasks got pushed out of scope for the Sprint. But it wasn't all bad. I learned to adapt, and in some cases I split the bigger task into little baby tasks (the equivalent of maybe half a Story Point) and nibbled away at them everyday. For example my home improvement project was to redo the inventory and organization of my kitchen cabinets. After my fourth house and close to two decades of living with the same person, you collect an amazing detritus of stuff that lurks like a crouching demon at the back of your cupboards. You know what I'm talking about. That one complex juicer you bought on that health kick a decade ago with the four hundred and twenty seven different attachments that now are scattered throughout everything. The yogurt machine with its component fifty seven little jars and nick nacks. The collection of various single purpose kitchen tools that are amazingly handy for that one time you pull them out at Thanksgiving to actually cook something besides the four basic meals you make the rest of the year. Yeah - that stuff.
I had naively assigned the entire task to a single day, and once I sat down (or perhaps stood up rather) to actually take on the project, I discovered it was a much larger task than I had originally scoped. As a result I decided to split the task into multiple stories and spread it out over the Sprint. In fact, I still have my silverware to deal with as of writing this. For some reason we have five thousand forks and only six spoons. Anyways, this allowed me to make some real progress without simply giving up on the task as being too big to take on. I believe this is one of the fundamental ideals behind Agile Development, and one that is directly applicable to almost any endeavor in life that is more ambitious than simply getting up in the morning. Actually, scratch that - getting up in the morning can be pretty dang hard at times as well!
So, Sprint "Solo Daddy" is complete. I then called the All-Hands meeting to go over the previous Sprint and plan the next. In the middle of the Sprint Planning meeting my youngest daughter realized she had somehow forgotten to do any homework for the entire weekend, and it was all due in the morning. There was some wailing, some denial, some panic, and then some late night cramming. My Sprint Planning meeting was blown away like so much detritus before the storm of a ten year olds full on five alarm fire panic.
Needless to say Sprint "Muskasprints" got off to a rocky start. I realized on my morning walk I made the classic manager mistake. If you are going to get team buy in for an All-Hands Meeting you get one, maybe two free passes where they will actually show up and be interested. After that they quite rightly wonder why they have to go to all of these meetings in stead of doing their actual job. So what do managers do? They bribe them. "Come to the All-Hands, we have free drinks and pizza!" "Come to the All-Hands! We are giving out T-Shirts this time!", and so on. I am thinking for my next Sprint Planning meeting to do it at an ice cream shop, ice cream in hand, with a captive audience. Hell, maybe I'll even throw in a free T-shirt as well.
So, at the end of the day all of the best careful planning can't always plan for real, actual Life. But we Domestic Engineers soldier on none the less. I am learning the importance of building more flex into my schedules to take this into account as a result.
"Bend like the willow, lest you break like the oak..."
