Lessons from Agile, at home with my kids
We’ll all have more time on our hands!
….they said.
They were wrong!
We’re in our third week of working from home thanks to coronavirus and I feel like I’m busier than ever. In Tech at Treatwell we’ve done a great job of transitioning to new ways of working, especially for a team that values face to face collaboration so much. So work continues apace! But now, with a messy family of four at home all day, every day, we have more cooking, cleaning and other chores to do. And then there is home “school” for Elsie, who is eight and Megan, aged six. First up we suggested the girls, who are Malory Towers fans, give the school a name, which went exactly as I expected it might.
Much like for me, there is no shortage of things to keep the kids busy. Our kids’ school have been brilliant at sending work home. And then there are dance classes, cooking classes and Brownies that are continuing over Zoom and Facebook live. Not to mention PE with Joe Wicks, dancing with Oti Mabuse, rainbow making, virtual escape rooms, quizzes, music practice, group chats with friends, Frozen sing-a-longs, daily exercise and aaaargh! And then, on top of all that, my wife Katie and I came up with our own list of activities to keep the kids happy and learning.
So, the kids have a long, very fluid list of options to choose from. They have daily timeboxes to work with. There are some constraints, or policies around which tasks they can do each day. We need to try out some ways of managing all this and quickly inspect how we are doing, then adapt. If your Agile spidey-sense isn’t tingling by now, you are clearly not as much of a nerd as me!
Inspired by this from the awesome Renee Tsielepi, I decided to have a go at bringing a bit of Agile to Fartory Towers.
Initially, I had the principles of self-organisation, sustainable pace and reflect-and-adapt in mind. We started with a backlog, a very basic Kanban board and daily stand-ups.
The backlog is a spreadsheet with all the possible tasks and some relevant metadata such as the timeboxes for each task (25 minutes, 50 minutes or both) and whether they can do the tasks themselves, with me or Katie.
At stand-up, which takes place at 8:15am each day, the girls choose which tasks they are going to complete. There are a number of explicit policies we all agreed to. For example, they need to do at least 50 minutes of school Maths, 50 minutes of school English, some reading and something physical each day. They also have a fixed number of timeboxes to fill with “self” items as opposed to things they need help with from me or Katie.
The constraints help the girls to make sure they do enough of a variety of different types of activity, which brings Kanban classes of service to mind! The timebox constraints and daily pull of tasks from the backlog also promote sustainable pace by making sure they take regular breaks between activities and that they finish “school” at a fixed, sensible time each day. Got to leave time for those video chat gossip sessions!
The element of self-organisation where they choose their own tasks each day has been a huge hit. It’s early days, but so far, they have been happy and enthusiastic to complete pretty much everything they have taken on. After just a few days, the girls started to run the stand-up themselves, referencing the backlog, writing post-it notes and adding them to the board.
The board is a very simple three column affair which the girls update fastidiously throughout the day. They love the visualisation of progress and the satisfaction they get from physically moving items to “DONE”. The post-its are colour coded. Orange ones are tasks where I am helping, yellow for Katie, pink are things they do themselves and green is their designated early morning quiet task for after stand-up before the Joe Wicks carnage. We also indicate on each item if it has a 25 minute or 50 minute timebox.
Last Friday, we held our first retro which the girls loved! We followed a simple “what went well”, “what went badly” format with grouping and dot voting and then we identified some actions for this week which we kept on our board for visibility.
The retro was surprisingly reminiscent of ones I’ve held with development teams, with typical items raised like “too many interruptions”, “too much arguing” and, er, “one of the team keeps calling me piggy”!
We’re also working on one rather elaborate multi-week project, which we are definitely delivering both iteratively and incrementally. If we pull it off, I’ll share more another day!
I’ve found it both fascinating and inspiring to see how intuitively Elsie and Megan have grasped the practices we are using. I haven’t talked to them much yet about the underlying principles but I have a feeling they’ll take to them pretty well too.
