Agile - Tumblr Posts

So funfact: I’ve been a corporate artist for 6 years now! One of the management tools I use to lead my team is called Agile.

Ready for the brain dump? For anyone dealing with executive dysfunction, planning issues, or schedule issues I recommend you keep reading!

Agile is basically a management system that breaks down projects into their most basic tasks and allows you to schedule those in “sprints”. For this I’ll use my real life example project of “Keep my apartment clean”

I start with the overall task- keeping my place clean, and evaluate what needs to happen on a large scale to do this. I decided to divide it up into individual rooms first. Then each room gets a task list- so kitchen has sweep, do dishes, clean stove top, etc. Bedroom and living room have their own lists too. 

Next- each task is given a difficulty rating. In my job we assign these numbers based on the fibonacci sequence. so 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc. the purpose of this is a reeeeally difficult task gets weighted accordingly. Vacuuming a room is an 8 for me, cause I’d rather wash 4 windows (rated at a 2) than vacuum once.

Now I fit these all into a schedule. I don't like cleaning so I decided that I will only do 1/2 hour every weekday and vacuum on Saturdays. I figured since I already had the tasks divided by room I’ll just clean 1 room per day, but you could divide it up to all sweeping and dishes get done Monday, or laundry will take multiple days to do (day 1 wash stuff, day 2 put it all away). The weekly schedule is now what is called a sprint, a list of tasks that can be done in 1-2 weeks.

For large projects the sprints theory really come in handy. I can assign individual tasks an end date, divide up tasks for my team members to get done and make sure I don't assign all of the really difficult tasks to be done the same week and burn out.

Agile also has built in evaluations. So lets say I have a week where my family is coming to visit- I know I wont have time to clean while they are here and the week after I’ll have double work to do. I can assign more tasks that usually happen once a month (like cleaning the bathtub) to be before they visit and a lot small tasks for after they leave (like sweeping and washing windows). Agile is about having a flexible schedule based on the tasks that NEED to be done, and finding the best time to do them.

As a writer, you are dealing with more abstract tasks than just clean things though. So you may have little to no tasks that repeat themselves, and your list may look like this: Overall goal-Write a story. Task 1: plot  Task 2:characters/personality truths  Task 3: chapter 1. The overall project may seem massive, but breaking down into their smallest pieces and just picking 1 a day to work on can make it less daunting.

if you want to know more about agile there are countless business blogs and sites explaining it, like this: https://www.cio.com/article/3156998/agile-project-management-a-beginners-guide.html 

ok, data dump over. hope this can help with school/work/life stuff anyone is dealing with

Getting professional bout this...

Made for my character an alt noodle form

What is "Agile" anyway?

So...

I feel like my posts are best when I write about things on my mind. And because of my job, "dark agile" and "dark scrum" have been a lot on my mind. "Dark" basically is used to mean "Subversive" or "Pretending to do X, but in fact doing to opposite.

Dark design for example, refers to design that is worse for the users ( Making it harder to say no to cookies than yes for example).

But to talk about dark agile, I have to explain what agile actually is. I also want to do this because agile is super simple. But if you ever want to see a LOT of successful scamming, check out business management consulting. A LOT of people have a vested interest in making it sound a lot more complicated than it is and/or ignore what it actually is in favor of telling companies what they want to hear.

Agile is short for "Agile software development"

First, understanding the problem agile solves:

Small companies can change what they are doing, and how they are doing it really quickly. They are also very good at listening to their developers and put their good ideas into practice.

As companies grow larger, they quickly lose these abilities.

Agile, is a way to keep those abilities in a larger company. This is done by giving each development team freedom to develop however they want ( not WHATever they want ), and to give them as direct a line as possible to whoever is the decision maker for the thing they are developing, which allows them to change what they are developing very quickly, but in a way that still leaves that decision maker happy.

Or in other words, encourage worker empowerment and grassroot organization ( Can you guess why companies REALLY try hard to not actually do agile? :p )

That's it. That is agile... as in, all of it.

You can read the agile manifesto and the agile principles, which flushes out what exact values agile is trying to achieve, but you basically already have all the info

If you are thinking "But what about Scrum?", scrum is a proposed tool to achieve agile. It is not agile, nor is it part of agile. Agile is a goal. Scrum is a tool that may help a company reach that goal.