Develop and Deliver, Better and Faster

Regardless of your current situation, you likely have some things you would like done, you also likely want them done better and faster.
Being in the digital age, this has become an almost universal requirement for most job positions. Worse so when one is working for oneself, comes the realization that worthwhile actions will need to be done and need to be done NOW! And everything seems to be Urgent level over 9000
With the pressure mounting from your boss or your looming rent date how then do you get yourself to perform faster? What about better ?
For this, one quote drives me …
When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates. — Karl Pearson
The above advice boils down to doing two key things - to attain an improvement in performance and additionally to accelerate the rate of this improvement:
- Measure performance
- Report performance
Measure Performance
Please note that this blog is targeted at individuals using some version of agile as a methodology when working. Learn more about Agile here
- In your own work system, you will have something with the same concept as sprints(hours of work each day, days of work each week, months of work) It really doesn’t matter as long as you section your work from huge to large.
- Most of us will section our work into such
sprintsthen split those sprints further into smaller tasksissuesthese will then be split into subtasks for most of us the work defined as subtasks will be items you can finish is a measurable amount of time and a short one at that.
Assuming the scenario above is applicable to you and your work.
In order to measure performance, you will have to build a scale upon which you will measure said performance.
The easiest way to do this would be through observation …
At the beginning of sprint, assign effort estimates to all your issues. Common ways to do this are (shoe sizes, coffee sizes, t-shirts sizes, Fibonacci numbers) the unit you choose doesn’t matter however it matters that yourself and or your team is comfortable estimating task sizes using this unit.
It is key that you estimate your task’s effort it doesn’t matter that the estimate might not be right.
The first few estimates will likely be off but as you go along through observation and mindfulness you will build a scale that works for you and your team very well.
Having estimated the effort your tasks will take it is now time to decide on a Release this is typically what you want as a result at the end of your sprint, in essence, your True North for this sprint. Deciding on a release is important as it serves as a reminder of the purpose for the current work and as a yard stick at the end of the sprint serving as a checkpoint for whether you achieved your goal or not.
Yay! most of the hard bits are done.
With your objective(release) decided and your backlog primed it is now time to decide what issues/deliverables you will tackle in this sprint.
Choose
- Tasks that get you closer or achieve your release goal.
- Only enough tasks to match your estimated effort with the time you have allocated yourself for sprints.
- Add a few light weight or heavy tasks to work on in case you finish your core tasks early (😃 Good News! this happens more than you would expect).
Start chipping away…
But wait! There’s more!
How about those of us who want report their performance you know for that increased rate 😉
Report Performance
This is mostly assumed to apply only to those with seniors at work and managers you know the suit and money types.
However, this could not be further from the truth. When we are trying to improve our performance and the rate of that improvement. We are not trying this for our companies, startups, relationships, jobs, partners. We are in this for us.
Primarily we are responsible for and to ourselves and we must treat our own goals and missions with utmost respect and urgency
Therefore we owe it to ourselves to report our progress, work and time usage to the ultimate owners of those items being ~ ourselves.
At the end of a Sprint before jumping right into the next one and hacking out those solutions, having witnessed your performance improve because by now you have been measuring it.
Take some time to go through your completed sprint, commonly this is referred to as a Sprint Retrospective .
As you go through your completed sprint consider and note the following,
- Note how long it actually took you to complete task vs how much effort you estimated the task at. Does estimating future tasks look simpler?
- Note all completed tasks and how they relate to the release you wanted were they relevant? Were they completely off point? Can you choose better now?
- Note how many tasks you did not complete and why they weren’t completed. Could you add a safeguard to ensure this doesn’t happen again?
Once here Rise and rise again until lambs become lions.
One more thing! Did you like this, Press the tiny green heart on your left it matters so much to me 😄
Would you like to speak more about productivity please feel free to leave comments down below. I’ll reply to all of them.
Back To Code! 😝

