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Engineer Your Life: Agile for Work and Play
12:24 with Miranda RenschAgile development, it's not just for software companies anymore. Miranda will show us how you can use an agile process to plan anything from side-projects, marketing launches, and personal improvement goals. You'll come away with templates and processes to try in your own team or at home!
Presentation Slides
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0:00
[MUSIC]
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Hello everybody, I'm Mirana, as Cyrus said.
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Temporaryhipster.com, by now.
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[LAUGH] yeah.
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So I'm gonna talk to you guys today about
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how to use Agile software development processes for whatever.
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Like, not software development. So let's get started.
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Oh, by the way, I made a prezzy, so I hope not too
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many of you are hung over, and you can handle all the zooming and
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the animations.
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It's a good thing it's Tuesday, and not Wednesday.
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okay, so, have you guys ever experienced this
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phenomenon where you've been working on a project
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for a really long time, and you know,
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you're just like, you're kind of in the groove
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of it, and it's been going on for a while and you're like, trying to remember
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like, when you first started the project, like
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what were you trying to get out of it?
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Well agile is A, a process that kind of helps
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you adapt over time and be able to remember the
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big picture goals of why you're doing what you are doing.
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So what is Agile?
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It started as this, well it still is a software
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development process and the manifesto is kind of based around,
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focus on the individuals working on the project talking to
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one another instead of documenting every little detail about the project.
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It focused on collaborating with customers a lot, and responding to change over time
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and, as opposed to following a really, really long term plan.
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So for our purposes it's basically just the strategy
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for getting things done, where you commit to things in
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small increments, and you adapt along the way based on
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the high level goals that you've set up for yourself.
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And you're measuring success on a really regular basis.
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[INAUDIBLE] So what I'm gonna walk through is kind of this, this idea of
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this board that you can put together and it can be a physical board.
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Or at the end of the slide I'll have a link to a [INAUDIBLE] template
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if you wanna have like have an interactive version.
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2:00
But so let's go through this in kind of three steps.
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So,oh, by the way Another terminology that you hear
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a lot in Agile is the word sprints, and
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that is basically the increment of time that you're
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going to commit to a set number of tasks.
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So for this purpose we're gonna say like, four week sprints.
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So in week zero before you even start,
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you're gonna do this step of mission envisioning.
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I'm sure this is something you guys are already familiar with, But at the
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beginning of a new project it can be really go to like take some time
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with you, with yourself or with your team to really clarify what you wanna do
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what like even the culture of the team and how you want that to be.
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And if it's a personal project, maybe like what makes me specifically unique?
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Like what, what characteristics Am I trying to be when I do these
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personal projects?
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So here's a few tools that I've found for this.
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Many of you have probably seen the business model canvas.
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I will include a download to this at the end of the, the presentation.
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But yeah, it has a lot of really great prompts in there
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and it, you know, you can't probably see cuz it's really tiny
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but there's, like, five Prompts for all of these things about who,
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who do you want to help you, like, who are your customers,
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like what, what kind of costs are you gonna have
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things like that what, how are you gonna make money?
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Whatever
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you know, money, whatever.
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Press release is a really fun one that I like to do with
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product management but you could also do it for like, like brand changes or
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like A viral campaign but kind of write about how you would you
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want people to receive your project when it's done in its most idealistic form.
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Like what would the best press release ever say or what would
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a magazine article write about you in one year, and three years, and
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five years Putting that up somewhere public that your team can see
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can be kind of inspiring to see like this is the eventual vision.
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For personal or cultural visioning, and by that I mean like, within
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your team if you wanna like, kind of specify together like you
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know we have tag fee but kind of specify together what your
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culture wants to be like You can try some of these things.
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So desired feelings or attributes
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is this idea of asking yourself a bunch of questions to get to, what three desired
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feelings do you do, do you want that is the reason you are doing your project.
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So if you're like, I'm going to like eat healthier and exercise more.
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Like, what is that feeling is it that you want to
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feel healthier or is it that you want to feel more energetic?
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Like.
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What is it exactly?
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Best week ever, if you wanna, this is would be a fun one to do with your team.
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To be like, if our
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team had the best week ever like how do we interact with each
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other, what projects do we do, how much time do we spend on
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what, and what types of tactics to we use to like have fun
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or be transparent with each other, use a good communication, things like that.
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And another one, I kinda mentioned but starting backwards.
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Like, list out.
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If you're the type of person like me who has like.
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I have like hundreds of Evernote files of just like projects I wanna do someday.
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Like,
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just, you can't do all of that stuff.
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So like, take it back and say like, why am
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I doing this project, why am I doing this project?
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Oh, all of these projects are because I wanna feel more creative.
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Like What's the one thing that I can
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do right now to satisfy that particular feeling.
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And then it's good to like, that can be a
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lot of stuff so just take all of that visioning exercises.
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Do a couple.
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With yourself or with your team and then distill it down into a mission statement.
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Maybe some of you have one already.
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But probably not a lot of people have personal
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mission statements which can be a fun a way
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to like stay focus and remember why you're spending
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time on personal projects that you're spending time on.
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Okay, next step is, let's set up some objectives and
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some key results, some, basically some ways to measure the
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work that we're gonna be doing in our up coming sprint.
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So let's look at some examples of this.
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So a good one might be, increase the number of happy customers.
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Erin just talked about this.
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It's super important.
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So set yourself, if this is like, the thing you're gonna focus on in the next
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three months, say, then set up two or
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three, like metrics that you're gonna measure by.
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So you can say increase customer's happiness by 10%.
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Well, how are you going to measure that?
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It's okay, don't worry about that yet, you'll, you'll create
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an item in your sprint that is like measure it
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now and measure it later and create the score and you
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have to have some like do the work to create the measurement.
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But for now just like set a baseline and you can
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adapt this as you actually start taking measurement as you go forward.
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Maybe it's like make work a happier more creative place.
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So again just like set kind of arbitrary measurements
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and you can figure out how to score that later.
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Oh and also be sure to set a date.
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So like by
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the end of you know q3 that's when we're going to measure.
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Or that's when we're going to start and then we're going
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to measure again three months after that or something like that.
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You can also set these by, like, the hour, hours of time that you want to commit.
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So if it's, like, be healthier, you're gonna
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spend an hour a day doing physical activity.
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So just say, you know, spend an hour a day.
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And you can also do it by a particular accomplishment,
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like, run 1000 miles in three months, or something like that.
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Okay, now for the fun part.
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Tactics and tasks, so actually doing the stuff that you are set out to do.
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So this is kind of like probably what you guys already have
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a bunch of notes on which is just a big huge brain
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dump of like methods for achieving these things that you want to
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achieve So, first of all just get everything out of your own head.
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Do a brain dump with that, then get
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your friends, get your family, get your coworkers.
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People from your team.
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Get people that you would, like, never get involved.
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Get customers involved.
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Think about it from a random weird perspective of, like,
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what would a wizard do? I don't know, just come up with something.
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Like something, a unique way to look at the problem.
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Have a, have a facilitated brainstorm session.
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So just spend a lot of time getting out all of these ideas, and then you're gonna
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pick your top ones for the next month, and
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you're going to put them on your board here.
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So, let's look at an example.
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So, for increasing the number of happy
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customers, Your gonna put enough items that you can commit to for the sprints.
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So if your doing four week sprints then you'll
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put enough items on this in deck, on deck column.
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Just that you can do in that time.
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So maybe we say okay, this month we're going to create really
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awesome brand new, [UNKNOWN] pub and its going to have great content.
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And we're gonna also build that really awesome
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tool that everybody really wants, and then every friends
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you should also have a like a measure that impacted that kind of a task.
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And then you're gonna have sub task off of that, so if you're like; create a new
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help hub, you'll have to, you build this help
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hub overlay, you're gonna have, to create the content.
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You're gonna do awesome video content strategy.
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And then as you work through them, every week you're kind
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of moving things into the in progress column and you can also
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assign owners.
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I wouldn't recommend assigning it to Lady Gaga she probably won't do it.
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And, you can put some estimated times like And then so
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if you want to be tracking how much actual time you've
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spent at the end of the sprint, like oh, we thought
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it was two days, but it was five days, why was that.
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Could be a good thing to bring up in your retrospective as Carin talked about.
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Another example, is kind of more a personal example.
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Is like if you have things like maybe you want to do some research tasks up front.
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Like maybe you're like, I don't know whats the best way
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to exercise like whats the new thing in the exercising front today.
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So you can have like your task in there for research.
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You can also just have blank ones that you add along the
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sprits to kind of help you see when You know in those
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like, putting out the fire tasks get added up,
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and that like, prevents you from doing some of
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the other things that you committed to, it can
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be helpful to put those all together so you're like,
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oh, well just, we were valuing this other thing,
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and that's why the stuff we tried to commit
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to got pushed out, and maybe you're okay with
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that, or maybe you need to figure out a strategy.
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yeah, so then you just move it over
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throughout time between in deck, in progress, and done.
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And if you have a ton of ideas then, like way more than you
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can commit to in one month, we create this thing called a backlog, which
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is essentially kind of your spectrum of ideas, like, fleshed out, like, to a
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very high level that you can just keep a place A spreadsheet, a to-do list.
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Whatever you wanna do, whatever works for you for that.
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And also, don't forget to celebrate your successes.
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It can be really motivating to be able to see
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like, like, that's why the done pile is just so exciting.
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It's so satisfying to move it over there.
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But you can also try the strategy of like, Maybe you can
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have a success column where you try to extrapolate on that success.
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So if I'm like oh, like this month I
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did 30 days of kick boxing, which would be crazy.
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And I've never done kick boxing, but I should.
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But you could do, you could extrapolate on that success.
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You could be like I did kick boxing and now
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I'm like super strong and I can run away from robbers.
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And I can save orphans or whatever, like a
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[LAUGH] more realistic example might be, you know we
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created this new help hub and Like documenting, like
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how much more visits that brought to the help content,
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how much the hap, customer happiness score went up.
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Maybe you can start pasting like, tweets that you get from customers there.
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Like, anything you could do to be like,
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hey everybody who worked on this, check it out.
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Like, people are really excited about it.
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It's really doing awesome things for us and our team.
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Team.
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Did a lot of kickboxing. I think that's it!
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So if you go to these bit.ly links, the top
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one is this worksheet that I put together that kinda just
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like, goes through this since Prezi is kind of like, not
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as easy as a PowerPoint to copy stuff from and things.
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But it has all the downloads, the, some exercises related to
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like desired feelings and best week ever and things like that.
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And then the Agile trailer board
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one is linked to the trailer board which is kind of like
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this board it's like not all laid out like that but trailer
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board in a nice tool so you can use that and you
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can follow me on twitter and I'll tweet this [UNKNOWN] as well.
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So thanks, everybody.
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>> [NOISE]
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