Lisa Call

My Taskboard on Oct 1

My Scrum Taskboard

In September I wrote several posts about using Scrum to manage my art career. In the last post I wrote about taskboards and explained how I was using it to track all the work I wanted to complete in September.

Quick refresher - the colored cards are the goals for the month (user stories) and there is 1 per row on the board. Each of the white cards are tasks that need to be completed for the bigger goals. The first column are tasks not yet started, the second column are tasks in progress and the final column are completed tasks. The colored cards on the right are goals I’m tracking but not actively working on.

Comparing the board from today from the board closer to the beginning of the month:

 
You can see I got a lot done. Certainly not everything but that big pile of cards in the completed pile indicates I did a heck of a lot art business and marketing this month. Probably the most focused and organized I’ve been in a long time, if not ever, for the business side of art.

This very visual indication of what I want to get done is a huge incentive for doing things. So I’m calling my first initial trial with scrum to be a big success.

Blocked Tasks

One thing I will add to my board is a 4th column. This is where I will put tasks that are blocked and in need of an external event for it to move forward. Such as waiting to hear from juried shows, or to get a return email, etc. I’d like a way to distinguish these tasks from the tasks I am actively working on (in column 2).

If a task is blocked for a long time it might mean I need to check in with the progress, or reevaluate the tasks and maybe find another solution.

Most of the goals (the colored cards along the right hand side of the board) are user stories where one of the tasks is currently blocked so once I add a new column these have a more natural home on the board.

Real Sprints

In scrum the goal is to put up on the taskboard only the work for a single sprint (I’m doing 1 month sprints). I obviously have much more work on my board than that so am not really sticking to that aspect of scrum.

There is a lot of value in seeing all (or at least most) of the work completed after a sprint completes so I’ll eventually get there but I’m not worried about it right now since my house is a big priority. We will hopefully begin building in a few weeks. I’m trying not to set too high of expectations during the building process.

Making Art in September

Although not managed through the scrum taskboard, september was a really good month in my studio also. One of my goals is to make art every day. Between work and kids and the house, it’s my escape and it helps keep me centered.

For September I worked in my studio 25 out of 30 days for a total of 55 hours. I completed 2 new pieces in my Structures series (#98 and #99) and made several small textile paintings.

Yay. That puts a smile on my face.

October Goals

So now it’s a new month and time to set new goals and maybe put some new goals/user stories up on my taskboard. I have some projects that ave been languishing on my todo list for months as I feel I’m still not quite caught up after moving in June. These are completed in October, I’m sure of it!

The first big goal for Oct will be to write and email my September studio newsletter. Then I’ll turn to a few misc tasks and then finally, I’ll tackle my website redesign project. I excited to get back to it.

Managing the Work

In my last Art and Scrum post I talked about tasks, which are basically todo lists for each of the stories.

As we all know there are many ways to maintain todo lists. I’ve tried all sorts of different methods of managing them and some work better than others.

For a while I was managing the project and task lists from Getting Things Done with a spreadsheet. [as an aside - I find the project lists and task lists from GTD very similar to stories and tasks from sprint - very similar - just different names and slightly different descriptions as to what they are]. There are also several software programs that can help project teams maintain their tasks lists. I think they are overkill for what I’m doing with my art business.

I didn’t much like the spreadsheet as I’m not big on putting lists online. I much prefer to hand write my lists as there here is something more satisfying about the writing process than typing. I also find online lists get out of date quickly and lists online are basically obsolete as soon as they are printed. I’d make notes on the printout and then weeks later I’d give up with the online list.

So I’m going with what many scrum experts claim to be the best way to do this: a task board.

The Task Board

A task board is a whiteboard or corkboard or some such thing that can be divided into columns and rows. I’m using one of my smaller portable design walls and have it attached to my wall as shown above.

I’ve written each story on a notecard and these are all in the left hand column. Acceptance criteria are noted on the card along with deadlines or any other notes I think are important to remember. Only stories for the current sprint are placed onto the task board.

Each task for each story is written on a white index card (sticky notes work great with white boards). There are 3 columns where a task card might be placed:

1. Not Started: The tasks all start in the second column on the left. This is the column for tasks not yet started.
2. In Progress: When a task is started it is moved into the next column over - this is for all tasks in progress
3. Completed: When a task is completed it is moved again to the next column - for all tasks completed.

By moving the tasks physically on the board I can see in one very quick look how the sprint is going. As you can see in the above photo, I had just started this sprint as almost nothing is done and just about everything is in the not started column. As the month has progressed I’ve been moving cards to the right. At the end of the month I’ll take another picture and show what it looks like.

The Daily ToDo List

I find that having this huge pile of tasks to tackle can be overwhelming and I can start spinning my wheels. This board is really pretty and cool but I can’t use it on a day to day basis.

So each night I evaluate where I am and I move tasks cards around as they change status. I then pick 2-5 tasks that I want to work on the next day and write them down on a piece of paper. My favorite - little scraps of paper that I can carry around as I move through my day. And I get to cross stuff off. Who doesn’t love crossing stuff off a list.

This little todo list allows me to put the big task board out of my mind (so I can avoid those "oh my gosh I have way too much to do how will I ever get it done" thoughts). I just focus on just a few items knowing that they are steps that make sense that will move me forward towards my larger goals.

A Few Notes

You’ll notice some yellow and orange story cards on my task board on the right hand side. These are for stories that I’m not actually working on right now but I don’t want to forget about. Things like juried shows I entered and I’m waiting for results, or commission projects that are on currently being approved, etc. I know I won’t have to "do" anything this month on these stories but I don’t want to forget about them either.

You’ll also note there are not tasks for the last 2 stories on the board. That’s cause I didn’t have them written when I took this picture. I now have tasks for one of them and am working on tasks for the last one (the update of my website). This is not good scrum. I’m not sure I care.

The Rest of the Stories

The stories on this board are just the stories I want to work on for September. All of the rest of the stories (in scrum called the product backlog) are also written on index cards and they are stored on a shelf next to this board. Every once in a while I flip through them to make sure I’m not missing anything important.

I also add new stories to that pile when I think of new things I want to do. I used to have great ideas for things to do with my art career but didn’t really have a good way to capture them. I’d write some in my sketch book, some got added to todo lists and many were just forgotten. Now I keep a stack of blank note cards and just jot it down and add it to the list.

 
I find this visual and tactile representation of the goals I’m working on for the month to be really helpful. In one quick look I can see how things are going. Right now I’m thinking this is one of the better things I got out of my scrum training.

Structures #24    ©2003    32" x &23quot;

 
Today I finally get to breaking stories into tasks. [See all posts about here: Scrum and My Art Business.]

Tasks - The How

When I summarized the overall scrum process and sprints in my last post I didn’t give much information about how a team goes about completing the user stories. This post starts to address the nitty gritty on how that works.

A user story is a goal. In software the goal is stated as seen from the point of view of a user of the software. For example a user goal for amazon might be "I want to search for books about a given topic".

This is great for understanding what the software needs to do but it’s not much information for figuring out the day to day things a developer needs to do to make it happen. Developers need more technical details that explain how to go about doing something.

So the missing step that I glossed over in the last post was that during the planning meeting for a sprint the team breaks all of the user stories for the sprint into tasks. Small chunks of work that give the developers step by step tasks for getting the work done.

In simple terms:

A user story tells What and Why.
A task tells How.

From Stories to Tasks

Breaking the user stories down into tasks is not a simple process. In software, much of the design of the system is determined in how the work is broken down. Are there tasks to design a database? If so that must mean there is a database in the system.

The same is true when I think about breaking down my art goals into tasks. The user stories I wrote for my art business are big picture types of goals. They are what I want to get done and just like in softwware they aren’t telling me how to go about doing it.

One of my user stories is "Go Live on My New Website". This only tells me I want to redesign my website. It doesn’t tell me how to actually do it. There are several ways I can approach this - these are both reasonable task lists for this story:

1. Get proposals and bids from 3 website designers for my new site.
2. Select designer.
3. Finalize design with website designer.
4. Approve completed work.
5. Tell the world about my completed website.

or

1. Install wordpress for new website design.
2. Design new template for website.
3. Create portfolio pages for website.
4. Create bio pages for website.
5. Create homepage for website
6. Flip the switch and make new website live.
7. Tell the world about my completed website.

Which tasks are selected to complete a goal determine what type of work is really involved in a user story.

When Do I Have to Know How

There is no reason to know how to actually make a user story happen when it’s written. All I need is a dream or a goal and to write it down. Making it real and making it concrete by putting it in writing.

It’s too easy to forget my brilliant ideas so I try to write them down when I think of them. Now I have a great place to store my art business ideas. In my master list of user stories (which in scrum is called a product backlog, but "list of user stories" works for me). Jotting down ideas and adding them to this list is a great way to keep track of ideas.

When I reprioritize the list I can decide if it’s worth pursuing. The great thing is I don’t have to know how to actually do what I want to do when I write down the goal. I can figure that out later.

It’s only when it’s time to start working on a user story, ie it gets placed into a sprint, that I need to figure out the steps or tasks that will show me how to tackle the project. Than said, I believe spending some quality time working out the tasks is time well spent. A well thought out plan is never a bad idea. I try not to rush this step in planning.

Just Get Started

Some times a story is too large or unknown that I can’t figure out all the tasks. So I break it into pieces and only include the parts I know how to do. I leave the rest as something to figure out later. I might write a task that says: "figure out the rest of the tasks".

As long as I know at least 1 task to get me started that’s enough. The next step will become more obvious when I get the first completed. No knowing how to complete something is no reason not to make it a goal. I really want to quit my job and do art fulltime. To do that I need to sell my artwork.

So I spent some time thinking about the different ways I might want to sell my art and I made a user story around each one to try it out. I don’t know how to do some of them right now but I don’t have to. I can just get started on the ones I understand or at least identify the first step for a big unknown. With Scrum’s adaptive nature I can reevaluate my progress at any point and reprioritize my work.

What is a Good Task?

A few comments on what makes for a good task. In software it is a chunk of work that can be done by a single developer in a day or 2. For an art business it’s maybe not so clear. For me I feel a task needs to be something that I can do in a fairly short amount of time, maybe 3 or 4 hours at most but more often they are 1-2 hour tasks.

If a task is too large I sometimes find myself using it as an excuse not to do it. So I try not to make tasks that are way too big. I also find that tasks that are too small are really not worth writing down so I forget to do them, so I also try not to make things too granular.

I think some of this is personal preference. How much tolerance a person has for doing work without crossing something off a list or getting distracted.

Structures #24

Today I has happy to discover that I had never posted Structures #24 on my blog (or least I couldn’t find it). This made me happy because it gave me an image to include in this post.

This textile painting was the first piece I made after completing the work inspired by the Grand Canyon. While not officially part of that group, it sort of is. It’s maybe a cousin.

 
Next Scrum post will include some task management information.