How I'm absolutely boosting my productivity score every week
So, reader, last week, I took a look at how my workflow and execution was going in this post here.
After a week of action, and there was a lot of effort, the hard truth is I've got a lot of improvement to do.
Part of me still feels like I'm writing a blog for someone else.
Ten years ago, one of my freelancer jobs was ghostwriting a thought leadership blog for a tech firm's CEO.
As I write this, it feels like I am making this up for him, not me.
But the problems I'm having are mine, and I'm looking to sort them out.
Making my sprint board
Last week I wrote about how I'd sorted out my sprint board in Nifty and had a go at getting all our team into the scrum.
On Monday, at our weekly catch up, I shouted out a few things, and everyone agreed to have a go.
We decided a daily stand up in slack was how we'd start; ten people in five times zones means a written update works best.
Everyone also gently suggested I could give them more work and stop trying to do everything solo.
After 20 years of being a freelancer, the habit of doing everything on my own is hard to break.
And it is not like I was superhuman at it; there is a lot of blood on the dance floor from me working this way.
I made my sprint board public and started to use it.
S&M catch up call
Every two weeks, all the marketing squad has an hour-long call and Jelena, Kristine, and Jeannine join in.
We kicked off this week with a stand-up; everyone shared what they are working on and what is in their way.
It went well, maybe only because I did less talking, so the whole thing was more interesting.
The energy felt good; Sharmae, our Hubspot warrior and soon to be Scrum Master, went off to hunt down stand up apps to plug into slack.
The next day everyone made their stand up in slack, and the same the day after.
So stage one happens fast; people were up for it, and now we need to make sure it makes sense to people.
It works like this.
Sharma sends a reminder message, and by the end of the day, everyone has added what they are doing.
I noticed my anxiety dropped by 70% when I read peoples updates.
This simple share frees up a part of my brain that started ticking about where we are and what we could do.
Soon we'll stop dicking around writing marketing reports and look at the sprint board to see what has got done.
With the sprint board updated daily, it will be more accurate than a report.
Fast Company
A lot happens in our marketing team; websites, blogs, emails and documents get spat out at an alarming rate.
Some weeks Alex, our founder, starts yet another company to operate in another part of the world.
We have a core group of products around:
- AML (anti-money laundering)
- KYC (know your customer)
- GDPR (I never know what that stands for)
- And a whole load of tech, fin-tech and marketing.
Everything happens fast.
This week we launched Grumble for business formation almost anywhere in the world.
Ask don't tell
In the JJ Sutherland books about scrum, he constantly rams home about listening to the team and working out how to do things together.
Telling them we're doing scrum is not going to get the best from people; we're going to slow down to speed up.
By Thursday, I'd started to get impatient about how we were doing scrum.
Then I realised we'd only talked about it on Friday and agreed to start it on Monday.
Jeff Sutherland, the co-founder of the Agile Manifesto, explains the structure of scrum in this video.
