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Goldilocks can teach us how to improve our agility, and I don’t mean by her well-documented technique of “how to jump through windows and escape from bears”.
The trick is to make your tasks so they are juuust right and then to learn to let go of any t-shirts and story points.
We all want our businesses to be agile. We want our teams to be able to deliver value continuously starting as soon as possible after the starting gun fires. We want to deliver better outcomes faster and build what was actually required. We want to create useful software and believe in people over process. Teams so often seem to end up spending ages debating whether some task is a 3 or a 5, and then later on why the last task we gave a 3 to turned out to be more of an 8 and the last few 5s were 1s and 2s. Choosing the best Fibonacci number takes time and if you take too long the bears won’t need the porridge…
There is only really one question you need to ask: is this task small enough? If the answer is no, then you need to break it down. Apply the same process to the sub-tasks. Once you learn what this juuust right size is for you and your team you will find that you are completing tasks on average at a near-constant rate. Some turn out smaller and some bigger but if you can make the average steady you can predict how long things will take without any size-to-time scale.
This talk will take you through some examples, tips and tricks for making this work.
