[MUSIC]

Hello everybody, I'm Mirana, as Cyrus said.

Temporaryhipster.com, by now.

[LAUGH] yeah.

So I'm gonna talk to you guys today about

how to use Agile software development processes for whatever.

Like, not software development. So let's get started.

Oh, by the way, I made a prezzy, so I hope not too

many of you are hung over, and you can handle all the zooming and

the animations.

It's a good thing it's Tuesday, and not Wednesday.

okay, so, have you guys ever experienced this

phenomenon where you've been working on a project

for a really long time, and you know,

you're just like, you're kind of in the groove

of it, and it's been going on for a while and you're like, trying to remember

like, when you first started the project, like

what were you trying to get out of it?

Well agile is A, a process that kind of helps

you adapt over time and be able to remember the

big picture goals of why you're doing what you are doing.

So what is Agile?

It started as this, well it still is a software

development process and the manifesto is kind of based around,

focus on the individuals working on the project talking to

one another instead of documenting every little detail about the project.

It focused on collaborating with customers a lot, and responding to change over time

and, as opposed to following a really, really long term plan.

So for our purposes it's basically just the strategy

for getting things done, where you commit to things in

small increments, and you adapt along the way based on

the high level goals that you've set up for yourself.

And you're measuring success on a really regular basis.

[INAUDIBLE] So what I'm gonna walk through is kind of this, this idea of

this board that you can put together and it can be a physical board.

Or at the end of the slide I'll have a link to a [INAUDIBLE] template

if you wanna have like have an interactive version.

But so let's go through this in kind of three steps.

So,oh, by the way Another terminology that you hear

a lot in Agile is the word sprints, and

that is basically the increment of time that you're

going to commit to a set number of tasks.

So for this purpose we're gonna say like, four week sprints.

So in week zero before you even start,

you're gonna do this step of mission envisioning.

I'm sure this is something you guys are already familiar with, But at the

beginning of a new project it can be really go to like take some time

with you, with yourself or with your team to really clarify what you wanna do

what like even the culture of the team and how you want that to be.

And if it's a personal project, maybe like what makes me specifically unique?

Like what, what characteristics Am I trying to be when I do these

personal projects?

So here's a few tools that I've found for this.

Many of you have probably seen the business model canvas.

I will include a download to this at the end of the, the presentation.

But yeah, it has a lot of really great prompts in there

and it, you know, you can't probably see cuz it's really tiny

but there's, like, five Prompts for all of these things about who,

who do you want to help you, like, who are your customers,

like what, what kind of costs are you gonna have

things like that what, how are you gonna make money?

Whatever

you know, money, whatever.

Press release is a really fun one that I like to do with

product management but you could also do it for like, like brand changes or

like A viral campaign but kind of write about how you would you

want people to receive your project when it's done in its most idealistic form.

Like what would the best press release ever say or what would

a magazine article write about you in one year, and three years, and

five years Putting that up somewhere public that your team can see

can be kind of inspiring to see like this is the eventual vision.

For personal or cultural visioning, and by that I mean like, within

your team if you wanna like, kind of specify together like you

know we have tag fee but kind of specify together what your

culture wants to be like You can try some of these things.

So desired feelings or attributes

is this idea of asking yourself a bunch of questions to get to, what three desired

feelings do you do, do you want that is the reason you are doing your project.

So if you're like, I'm going to like eat healthier and exercise more.

Like, what is that feeling is it that you want to

feel healthier or is it that you want to feel more energetic?

Like.

What is it exactly?

Best week ever, if you wanna, this is would be a fun one to do with your team.

To be like, if our

team had the best week ever like how do we interact with each

other, what projects do we do, how much time do we spend on

what, and what types of tactics to we use to like have fun

or be transparent with each other, use a good communication, things like that.

And another one, I kinda mentioned but starting backwards.

Like, list out.

If you're the type of person like me who has like.

I have like hundreds of Evernote files of just like projects I wanna do someday.

Like,

just, you can't do all of that stuff.

So like, take it back and say like, why am

I doing this project, why am I doing this project?

Oh, all of these projects are because I wanna feel more creative.

Like What's the one thing that I can

do right now to satisfy that particular feeling.

And then it's good to like, that can be a

lot of stuff so just take all of that visioning exercises.

Do a couple.

With yourself or with your team and then distill it down into a mission statement.

Maybe some of you have one already.

But probably not a lot of people have personal

mission statements which can be a fun a way

to like stay focus and remember why you're spending

time on personal projects that you're spending time on.

Okay, next step is, let's set up some objectives and

some key results, some, basically some ways to measure the

work that we're gonna be doing in our up coming sprint.

So let's look at some examples of this.

So a good one might be, increase the number of happy customers.

Erin just talked about this.

It's super important.

So set yourself, if this is like, the thing you're gonna focus on in the next

three months, say, then set up two or

three, like metrics that you're gonna measure by.

So you can say increase customer's happiness by 10%.

Well, how are you going to measure that?

It's okay, don't worry about that yet, you'll, you'll create

an item in your sprint that is like measure it

now and measure it later and create the score and you

have to have some like do the work to create the measurement.

But for now just like set a baseline and you can

adapt this as you actually start taking measurement as you go forward.

Maybe it's like make work a happier more creative place.

So again just like set kind of arbitrary measurements

and you can figure out how to score that later.

Oh and also be sure to set a date.

So like by

the end of you know q3 that's when we're going to measure.

Or that's when we're going to start and then we're going

to measure again three months after that or something like that.

You can also set these by, like, the hour, hours of time that you want to commit.

So if it's, like, be healthier, you're gonna

spend an hour a day doing physical activity.

So just say, you know, spend an hour a day.

And you can also do it by a particular accomplishment,

like, run 1000 miles in three months, or something like that.

Okay, now for the fun part.

Tactics and tasks, so actually doing the stuff that you are set out to do.

So this is kind of like probably what you guys already have

a bunch of notes on which is just a big huge brain

dump of like methods for achieving these things that you want to

achieve So, first of all just get everything out of your own head.

Do a brain dump with that, then get

your friends, get your family, get your coworkers.

People from your team.

Get people that you would, like, never get involved.

Get customers involved.

Think about it from a random weird perspective of, like,

what would a wizard do? I don't know, just come up with something.

Like something, a unique way to look at the problem.

Have a, have a facilitated brainstorm session.

So just spend a lot of time getting out all of these ideas, and then you're gonna

pick your top ones for the next month, and

you're going to put them on your board here.

So, let's look at an example.

So, for increasing the number of happy

customers, Your gonna put enough items that you can commit to for the sprints.

So if your doing four week sprints then you'll

put enough items on this in deck, on deck column.

Just that you can do in that time.

So maybe we say okay, this month we're going to create really

awesome brand new, [UNKNOWN] pub and its going to have great content.

And we're gonna also build that really awesome

tool that everybody really wants, and then every friends

you should also have a like a measure that impacted that kind of a task.

And then you're gonna have sub task off of that, so if you're like; create a new

help hub, you'll have to, you build this help

hub overlay, you're gonna have, to create the content.

You're gonna do awesome video content strategy.

And then as you work through them, every week you're kind

of moving things into the in progress column and you can also

assign owners.

I wouldn't recommend assigning it to Lady Gaga she probably won't do it.

And, you can put some estimated times like And then so

if you want to be tracking how much actual time you've

spent at the end of the sprint, like oh, we thought

it was two days, but it was five days, why was that.

Could be a good thing to bring up in your retrospective as Carin talked about.

Another example, is kind of more a personal example.

Is like if you have things like maybe you want to do some research tasks up front.

Like maybe you're like, I don't know whats the best way

to exercise like whats the new thing in the exercising front today.

So you can have like your task in there for research.

You can also just have blank ones that you add along the

sprits to kind of help you see when You know in those

like, putting out the fire tasks get added up,

and that like, prevents you from doing some of

the other things that you committed to, it can

be helpful to put those all together so you're like,

oh, well just, we were valuing this other thing,

and that's why the stuff we tried to commit

to got pushed out, and maybe you're okay with

that, or maybe you need to figure out a strategy.

yeah, so then you just move it over

throughout time between in deck, in progress, and done.

And if you have a ton of ideas then, like way more than you

can commit to in one month, we create this thing called a backlog, which

is essentially kind of your spectrum of ideas, like, fleshed out, like, to a

very high level that you can just keep a place A spreadsheet, a to-do list.

Whatever you wanna do, whatever works for you for that.

And also, don't forget to celebrate your successes.

It can be really motivating to be able to see

like, like, that's why the done pile is just so exciting.

It's so satisfying to move it over there.

But you can also try the strategy of like, Maybe you can

have a success column where you try to extrapolate on that success.

So if I'm like oh, like this month I

did 30 days of kick boxing, which would be crazy.

And I've never done kick boxing, but I should.

But you could do, you could extrapolate on that success.

You could be like I did kick boxing and now

I'm like super strong and I can run away from robbers.

And I can save orphans or whatever, like a

[LAUGH] more realistic example might be, you know we

created this new help hub and Like documenting, like

how much more visits that brought to the help content,

how much the hap, customer happiness score went up.

Maybe you can start pasting like, tweets that you get from customers there.

Like, anything you could do to be like,

hey everybody who worked on this, check it out.

Like, people are really excited about it.

It's really doing awesome things for us and our team.

Team.

Did a lot of kickboxing. I think that's it!

So if you go to these bit.ly links, the top

one is this worksheet that I put together that kinda just

like, goes through this since Prezi is kind of like, not

as easy as a PowerPoint to copy stuff from and things.

But it has all the downloads, the, some exercises related to

like desired feelings and best week ever and things like that.

And then the Agile trailer board

one is linked to the trailer board which is kind of like

this board it's like not all laid out like that but trailer

board in a nice tool so you can use that and you

can follow me on twitter and I'll tweet this [UNKNOWN] as well.

So thanks, everybody.

>> [NOISE]