Using Pivotal Tracker to track making a leather jacket

Andy Detskas
Aug 28, 2017 · 9 min read
The finished bomber jacket.

I’ve been using Pivotal Tracker for a couple years and I like how it is very rigid and rules-based in some areas, and flexible in others. Most of all, I like how it tracks velocity (think, “rate of completion” rather than speed) and I thought it would be helpful to quantitatively understand what was behind learning a new thing, such as making a leather jacket.

I’d never made a leather jacket before. My lifetime experience with sewing amounted to making a simple duffel bag in middle school, when there was still such a thing as Home Economics class. I was curious to see if an agile project management tool like Tracker worked as well making real things as it was at making whatever software is.

How the hell do you make a leather jacket?

This isn’t a story of making a jacket as much as it is about going off script and using agile project management software in a weird way. That said, you need a sewing machine, some supplies, a pattern, and hopefully some directions. With the pattern and directions in hand, it was clear to see how the step-by-step instructions would break down into “user” stories.

But how do you write stories when you don’t have a user, or customer?

Great question….me. Every development related story should be written in a way geared towards delivering value to the user, but since I don’t have a user I took a unique approach! I addressed this this value-driven approach by thinking about whether or not I was learning something from the overall process of making the jacket, or more importantly, if I was marching towards completion of the jacket.

Writing stories

Writing granular stories about each step of building the jacket was appealing, and more so than tools like Trello because Tracker would help me see my velocity and forecast when I will complete future stories. Further, it can show things like cycle time and cumulative views which provide insight to how long it takes to do things and how big the workload is. The value here is the same as if I was building software: a predictable, sustainable pace.

This was my first leather jacket prototype. It took about two months and you can see how stories would spike periodically. This was due to adding stories to account for uncovering and learning new aspects of building a leather jacket.

Writing stories for the jacket was easy but pointing them was weird because I didn’t know how to point the complexity of something I’d never done. Early on, many of my stories were pointed as threes out of uncertainty.

For those of you not sure what pointing is, it’s a way to describe complexity of a user story instead by hours, which is subject to change. Completing pointed stories helps determine your overall velocity. For instance, if I close 3 points in a week that’s pretty slow, 10 indicates quite high (although I’ve seen velocities as high as 21).

My uncertainty came from concern about complexity, not time, which is the perfect place to start. I thought about each step of making the jacket from the standpoint of a small, medium, or large amount of effort. A large effort was 3 points or more, which usually prompted me me to break things down to smaller pointed stories. The more honest I was able to be, the more accurate my velocity would be and therefore Tracker would be able to forecast completion of future stories and epics.

Because I didn’t have the benefit of pointing with a group and debating effort like a typical software project. I thought it would have been helpful to bring in a “pointing buddy” who I could explain a story to and have them there as a sounding board or a devil’s advocate. Once again though, it was clear that Tracker’s software building benefits carried over to making real objects.

Stories were written simply

Some stories were just the title, such as, “sew the shoulder seams”. I didn’t find much use for the typical story format so I changed my approach to detail steps that might be involved in a certain aspect of constructing the jacket. What I learned here is to take what you need and leave what you don’t with regard to how Tracker (and agile) are “supposed to work”.

Epics

I initially wasn’t sure if I should use epics to subdivide the jacket project into separate epics, or if the jacket project occupied a single epic. An important step about making a leather jacket is to make a prototype or “muslin” in cheap material before you blow a bunch of money mashing up some nice calf or lamb hides. Since I needed to make a prototype, it just made sense to have each prototype be separate epics.

Making epics is addicting. Since the jacket project wasn’t the only project I was working on, at one point I went crazy writing epics for all these projects I wanted to spin up. Once the stories were written for these epics, it was super interesting to see how easy it was to complete a bunch of stuff concurrently given the concept of prioritization and velocity.

This said, I started out with 20+ epics but after a month I found these only served to de-focus me. Yes, with deft prioritization Tracker could have guided me through all the various stories, but the lesson had been learned. I had set out to learn how to make a leather jacket, and given there wasn’t anything of greater priority at that time, I needed to take steps to correct my tendency to take on too much. The extra epics got axed.

Some stuff is going to live outside Tracker

Learning what goes in tracker versus what doesn’t was an ongoing learning process. Major projects were epics with stories attached while more for-fun type activities like updating my Instagram, or sketching in my sketchbook stayed outside, or reading. When I started putting chapters of a book I was reading into the backlog I knew my head had gone up my own ass.

Tracker should be about stuff I would generally call “work” and the efficiency of working in tracker and how it magically predicts your future velocity, should help you set boundaries around when you work and when you play. When I would complete all the stories for a given iteration, I was done for that iteration. At that point I could make the determination to close out some more stories, or go play. It’s best to go play.

Not everything is about productivity. Woof. This is a whole book waiting to be written. Tracker shouldn’t be your overall to-do list for life.

Focus

A month into this advanced nerdery, a strange thing happened. I’d narrowed down the epics and stories to focus, and then my view in Tracker depicted only a couple weeks into the future. This brought me closer to focusing on the present, as opposed to the far future. Sure, there are things we schedule like birthdays and trips to the DMV, but for now my attention had shifted to what I was doing now. The future would eventually show up and if I ran out of stories or chores, then I could assess where I needed to go from that point in time.

Another aspect of how Tracker focused me was by exposing my excitement about some new shiny thing that would trigger me to reprioritize stories or epics in a very disruptive way. I really had to check myself and carefully think about what is a flight of fancy and what is something I actually want to devote focus to. For someone who experiences random inspirations and revelations, it was helpful to have a mechanism in place that said “we can totally accommodate your desire to pivot, but you’ve accomplished this much of an epic, you have this much further to go. Abandon? Yes/No”.

Something else was having a low velocity week. This was a great signal that I need to refocus my efforts. Was there something really hard to accomplish this week? Was I too tired after working all day? That pang of disappointment when I didn’t close enough story points in a week was enough to motivate me adjust how I pointed stories, or investigate what was slowing me down. Without an overall velocity to compare this to, I would have only “felt” that I’d slowed down, but had nothing empirical to compare it to.

Chores and research

Lots of chores — Chores can often scratch an itch, but don’t result in project work from moving forward. I also learned that pointing chores obscures real points being closed on stories related to epics.

There was a point where I started out putting all chores into Tracker and it quickly became evident how much they dilute productivity. This caused me to reflect on how often I do chores, and how many I take on. As a result, I’ve isolated my chores to one or two evenings a week, leaving more time for work and play.

There was one form of chore that was quite productive and that was research. Research doesn’t always have a clear beginning and end but was a big component in getting under the unknowns of working with leather jackets. As beneficial as this type of chore could be, it included quite a bit of screen time, which I often feel conscious of to reduce.

Bugs

You may be wondering about bugs, but they don’t carry much currency in physical products. Sure, there can be the concept of quality assurance on how my leather jacket was constructed, but typically I work in small enough bits where I self-correct as I go. Therefore, no bugs.

Deadlines lacked pressure

Once I was up to speed with Tracker I never felt overwhelmed by what I had to do in a given week/iteration. Tracker’s ability to gauge my velocity and set an agenda that was easy to accomplish was terrific. If your velocity is accurate, and you’re good at writing and prioritizing stories. you should be able to forecast where your work will end with regard to a deadline.

Scrutinizing priority was almost always the best way to stay focused, and depressurize deadlines. If too many points stand in the way of completing something on time, what are those points? Do they represent stories you can push down the priority list?

Copying epics and updating stories

I ended up making 4 jacket prototypes before I made the leather jacket. An efficiency I found was in copying a previously completed epic, renaming it, and rewriting some of the stories. With rewriting, I was rolling my learnings into the next epic and making sure I didn’t repeat mistakes or omit details. With each completed epic, I was strengthening my knowledge and getting better. Not to mention, I was getting faster.

8 days and 12 stories days to complete my second prototype. Compare this to the first attempt that was two months and 57 stories.
The actual Leather Jacket epic, 13 stories in 14 days. I slowed down compared to my second prototype because I was being very careful to not ruin the leather as I worked on it. Fabric can heal from misguided stitches. With leather, the holes are there forever.

The universality of things that challenge projects

This experiment showed me the sameness between real-world projects and software projects. Focus, productivity, rest, and check-ins all apply no matter what you’re working on.

Getting into the weeds about how many epics to create, or loading every last little task as a chore is something that software projects suffer from too. This is where managing the project can become too much about managing the project. The idea behind tracker is to maintain a lock on priority with regular check-ins to help stay the course. When you start to drift, revisiting your priorities and velocity stories can bring things back down to earth.

When writing stories, trading user value for what we might learn was another commonality. Some software projects are exploratory, or don’t have a user. When this is the case, writing stories based on what you’ll learn is a great way to gauge complexity when pointing a story. With my leather jacket, tons and tons of value was gained with each closed story because I learned so much from each one.

Using Tracker for pacing out creative work was great for me. I never got burned out, super behind, nor did I need to burn the midnight oil. I was able to stay motivated while working at a sustainable pace that kept a good amount of brain space open. This isn’t unique to making a leather jacket, because the idea of a sustainable pace is almost universally applicable. We tend to think of “sweat equity” but honestly, working smart like this is arguably more valuable.

These bits of universality reinforce how well Tracker performs as a supporting structure for projects by understanding what causes projects to become imbalanced. If you’re curious about learning more, or getting setup feel free to reach out.

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