Time in a Box

It feels really good to have some space to immerse myself in writing. It seems as if it's been ages since I have had the time to sit down and write -- chapters for my book or this blog because I have been focused on higher priorities. Last month, I started a new consulting engagement designing professional development and training for agile transformation. While I am ecstatic to have landed a dream role that feeds my passion for teaching and enabling change, I have been intentional to reserve space for adjusting. This coveted opportunity has necessitated a shift in ranking of my personal and professional priorities. Unfortunately, I do not have a magic wand to wave and add more hours in my constrained 24-hour day, so I have found myself pausing to evaluate how to best spend limited time.

Realistically, at the end of the <proverbial> day, my incremental time on Earth is fixed but the duration is variable and unknown. In Agile terms, equivalent to "maximum capacity" for total possible hours to do 'something' before "discounting" hours to sleep/work. A quick math exercies: twenty-four hours in a day --> seven days in a week --> fifty-two weeks in a year equals 8,736 unless it is leap year and THEN I get a bonus of 24 more hours. I promise, I won't go down the rabbit hole of Daylight Savings time which proves Albert Einstein's belief that time is an "illusion".

As I approach mid-Centarian status, often I stop and reflect on my journey that brought me where I am today. It is enlightening every time I realize how much my priorities and perception have changed over the years.

The three month summer breaks when I was a kid seemed to drag on for an eternity because every June, I suddenly had school hours "back" with nothing else competing for "free" time baked into "summer break". In high school, my summers seemed to pass much faster because I was regularly traveling with Shawnee Aviation program or working travel & tourism internships.

When I was in my twenties as a single mother, I was hungry and motivated to work full-time while attending school at night or on weekends. My sparse "free time" was spent being a mother to my young son or doing schoolwork. Allocating time to those priorities paid off when I had earned my Bachelor's and Master's degrees before the age of thirty. In hindsight, I clearly "bought" back time by sleeping very little and running on fumes of the Dopamine fueled by my ambition.

By the time I reached my forties, Pandemic had brought the world to a halt which made it seem as if time recalibrated and slowed to the pace that I recall from my GenX childhood in the 1980's. Despite working from home full-time, the "free" time after work hours was truly "free" because there was nothing to do outside of the home as social distancing and isolation was our new norm.

My children are successful, independent adults so now as I approach my fifties, I find myself with more space to choose time for prioritizing "ME". The passing of my LIFEtime against the backdrop of surviving a global Pandemic radically shifted my individual frame of reference and motivation to remain constantly "busy". Unlike many people who felt like they hit a brick wall during the social distancing constraints of Pandemic, I find myself pining for an opportunity again to lean in where I can enjoy "time out" from the revolving door chaos of committments. My Grandma's advice warning me that the "older you get, the faster time goes...and your life is gone in the blink of an eye" is nestled in the back of my mind. While the facts are not quite accurate, the reality is that the more priorities competing for limited time does make it seem as if life is rapidly speeding up and passing by.

There are some common themes that cross over between my professional and personal lives that deeply fascinate me --> capacity/time and flow/priorities. As an Agile coach, I teach and reinforce concepts to help leaders shift to a mindset where they "Maximize the amount of work NOT done". Agile encourages organizations to fund teams of people presumed to have a fixed maximum available capacity...which by default forces prioritization for delivering valuable work. Leaders must take active ownership to rank and communicate highest priorities so teams are focused on doing the "right work at the right time". Mature Lean-Agile leadership mindset is demonstrated when leaders stop behaving as if teams can "buy" more capacity by adding more people or money. Good leaders evangelize a culture where teams have the space to grow efficiency through experience, which fuels higher performance so they can optimize limited capacity. This is a difficult transition for leaders who are not accustomed to being accountable or making tradeoffs.

How can leaders optimize team capacity and accelerate effectivness of Agile at scale? Lean-Agile leaders must honor cadence, timeboxes and capacity. In Scaled Agile Framework, teams of teams plan and deliver in an increment which starts and ends on a predictable (fixed) cadence of 8-12 weeks duration. Agile teams plan and deliver in iterations that start and end on a predictable (fixed) timebox of 1-4 weeks duration. Teams must be transparent and discount for diminished capacity when their teammates are out sick or on vacation. Leaders must minimize radical changes to persistent teams that introduce the element of chaos and disrupt their performance.

Five years ago, I was coaching a newly launched Agile release train through their first Big Room, onsite "quick start" PI Planning. There was a "delivery" leader who dictated to his directs what their estimate would be for each iteration in the PI. He had developed a formula for conversion of "X" story points that crosswalked to billable hours for an iteration. Every Agile team reporting to him provided the same estimate for different work items remaining static for all six of the 2-week iterations spanning a 12-week PI. On day 1 of PI Planning, he proudly announced that he expected the teams to "under commit and over deliver". There were no capacity discounts for time off because he had set the standard that the team had to make up for the diminished capacity. He bucked against my coaching advice to trust and allow the teams to collaborate so they could use experience to identify THEIR relative size for estimating work they were committing to deliver. He flat out refused to allow them to have ownership of their commitments because he was the "Delivery" leader who celebrated and rewarded unpredictability. As a coach, I was frustrated. But this was a pivotal moment in my career as I struggled with awareness that individual change management is unique to th person...balanced against the realization that not everyone is coachable.

Empowerment, relative estimating, and establishing predictability are not just professional attributes of Agile transformation. These are concepts applicable to daily life. Recently I used Agile concepts of timeboxes and prioritization to help my stepdaughter successfuly complete her final English project. She has a learning difference with impaired executive functioning that creates challenges for her in effectively planning and organizing her school work. At the end of her junior year, she was assigned to read "The Secret Life of Bees" for English class with one calendar week to complete the final project about the book. The assignment was complex and consisted of three components all due on the same date. She had 7 days complete all work and meet the deadline with no buffer since it was the end of the school year.

In addition to going to school every day, she was juggling competing priorities for constrained after school time because of band concerts, Math tutoring and other class homework/projects. Together, we approached planning by making all "deliverables" visible so that she could "break-down" and decompose the work into manageable chunks each day. There were tradeoffs for negotiables like time spent on the cellphone, watching TV or hanging out with her boyfriend. She set a goal to reserve two-hours every night to do work on her two final school projects in English and History from 6p-8p. I proposed some incremental "goals" each day so that she could remain focused. She took active ownership in making choices about how much work she was comfortable committing to complete every night in two-hours. Her father had established the expectation that her final projects must be submitted on time. If she was at risk for missing the deadline, then she would add more work hours during the weekend.

She did an exceptional job following HER daily and overall plan. Each day she would "demo" her work to her Dad and/or me. We praised her daily for incremental accomplishments and offered feedback that sometimes she accepted by incorporating into her work. As she settled into the predictability, there were days that SHE would adjust priorities by choosing to not split the two-hours between two subjects. Her rationale was she was on a "roll" with one subject --> **in agile this is "minimizing context switching". The deadline never changed but she felt empowered to adjust so long as the adjustment did not impact her ability to meet the due date. (Agile Manifesto Value #4 - "responding to change over following a plan".

She was over the moon when she received an "A" on her final English project, which exponentially grew her self-esteem and confidence. Her dad was so proud of her commitment and eagerness to accept help, which demonstrated her maturity with wilingness to embrace change. I felt encouraged because the techniques that I use professionally were successfully applied outside of a business environment, IT organization, or Agile delivery team --- proving my hypothesis that enabling transformation was not restricted to board rooms or big consulting firms. I am encouraged by the possibility that my passion for investing in people, teaching and coaching will transcend into areas where I can help people.

In a future blog edition, I will share some specific and tactical tools and techniques for how I have repurposed Agility in our home with using Definition of Done for chores, calendaring for transparency that helps manage anxiety as well as electronic tool to aid in keeping people who are easily distracted on target and focused.

"Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved. When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live." - Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees