Inflation @ Work, Agile Resolution

Of-course we know very well about inflation in Finance, means every year value of money is diminished by some percentage !! Hence we have to take insurance, or to do investments to have Safe and Healthy Financial Life !!

Same principle is applied at Work,

"Our strength to do work in Modern Technical World is diminished for every sprint/iteration/project/year if there is no Retrospective",

I am defining this as "Inflation @ Work"

Kalyan Katuru

Because Technical world is changing rapidly and Business is so Random and Sensitive in the Technical space. A lot of Hype, less reality, foolish Management & Execution, this is the Truth at least in 50% of the Projects, my guess :) !!

If we execute a Project successfully with some Luck and Foolishness, there is no guarantee that the new Project will be successful in same way. There is no guarantee for the Success of any new project even though earlier project is successful with Great Efforts of Team & Leadership. Possibility of a failure is nothing but a RISK. This Risk is much more bigger in the Modern Technical World.

So how Inflation @ Work works, means when we work on one Project and it is a success or a failure, we should analyse and make a note of few things from Result. What we have to note ??

At the end of the Project/Iteration/Sprint/Year, think on

• What went well
• What went wrong
• What is missing

Let us put these 3 items in other way

• What to Continue
• What to Stop
• What to Start

Let us see the Retrospective Items in a Ship Diagram !!

?

And collection of these points is nothing but the "AGILE SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE"

These will help us in identifying the Inflation @ Work, means with the same approach how bad we can do work in next iteration/project/year. Agile Sprint Retrospective helps us to identify our strengths and weaknesses of our work and also guides us by Projecting the Future work inflation.

To calculate the Inflation @ Work, we should focus more on "What to Stop" items. Please refer to the following simplified Examples.

Example-1:

If we are spending 50% of the Project time on "discussions" or "Waiting for Something".

We should stop or reduce this. Else our productivity rate is reduced by 50% or more than 50% in the next iteration/spring/project.

This represent the inflation rate. If we have not identified this, our inflation @ work will be greater than or equal to 50%.

Example-2:

If we are spending 70% of the Project time on "Fixing Bugs".

We should stop or reduce this. Else our productivity rate is reduced by 70% or more than 70% in the next iteration/spring/project.

If we have not identified this, our inflation @ work will be greater than or equal to 70%.

Example-3:

If we are spending 100% time of the Project just by making all the Tasks into "In-Progress"::

We should stop the starting of new Tasks. Else our productivity rate will be 0%. This is where Kanban helps to close the In-Progress items

And in the Final Note:

Risk is very High in the Modern Technical World and Probability of Repeating our mistakes is very very High. Hence we need a Retrospect on our Work to understand, estimate, reduce and remove the Inflation @ Work. Agile Retrospective is the best Resolution for it.

Thank you,

Kalyan Katuru