Productivity: Skyrocket Your Productivity the Agile Way!

In this lesson I describe what My Personal Scrumban© is and how it helps you boost your productivity while you manage either operational tasks or projects.

In the lesson I touch on the PDF documents included in this course that you should immediately print out to start your path to success. In the lecture I tell you how to select the most suited sticky notes for My Personal Scrumban©, and why you may find an Agenda useful for your daily records.

Before starting with the actual course, let me give you a few more suggestions to enhance your study experience and let you enjoy the ride even more.

A bit of history about Kanban, and our first experiences with the Kanban board.

“Kanban is a tool to track the evolutionary states of an action item”. Does this sentence look awkward? After the lesson, it will sound astonishingly easy.

The Backlog is the place where we give voice to all the activities and goals we want to achieve. In the lesson I teach you how to use it to gain clarity about priorities and stay productive.

The Board is the tool to visualize the process flow, identify the eventual roadblocks, and remove them to keep our productivity high. In this lesson you’ll learn how to use and personalize it.

What is Work In Progress? How to use it as a measure of how straightforward or messy our flow of actions is? Is multitasking really such a good thing? Some examples from real life will bring clarity about all of these questions.

Before moving on, let's test your understanding of the contents of this Kanban Section.

Enjoy!

Enjoy!

In this lesson I teach you how to set the stage before starting a challenge. Why are you starting it, in the first place? Is it really worth? What do you want to get out of it? What will Success look like? The Vision, and the clarity, you will gain in this episode and in the next one will be the key to stay on target when unexpected events and shifting priorities will shake you along the way.

How do you know that your project CAN be done? First, with right tools think through it and reflect on what is it really that you want to create. Then, when you have a clear picture of it, ask for feedback from those people who are likely to be using it afterwards.

The name of the precious tool that could save you efforts and disillusionment? The My Personal Scrumban© Feasibility Analysis.

Enjoy!

It’s time to go! Have a light backpack, this trip will be short and sweet. In the lecture I tell you what a Sprint looks like and a few rules to make it effective to reach your short- and mid-term goals.

In the Kanban Section you've already learnt a lot about the Backlog. But if you want to use it in Scrum, there's something more you have to know.

You need a Map before embarking for a new land. But what if nobody has ever visited that land? You create the Map with the elements you have now, with what you expect to find and with where you want to go. You set some checkpoints. You refine it over time. You constantly check it to verify where you’ve arrived, and you finally modify it if the land doesn’t look like you expected at first.

Welcome to My Personal Scrumban© Roadmap.

In this lesson you'll discover an easy yet foundational tool to get you focused even before your working day has started.

Enjoy!

So you’ve reached the first hilltop, congratulations! It’s time to show to the world what you’ve gained along the trip and to get some feedback. A Demonstration, or “Demo” is our occasion to touch with our hands what we’ve been able to produce in this first stretch of road. Did you get what you expected? Do your results so far meet your expectations and those of the people you started your trip for? How should you refine or expand it before the next intermediate finish line?

In the lesson I explain you how taking advantage of intermediate checkpoints to get straight to your final goals.

Before starting with the next Sprint, let’s talk for a minute about the process you’ve followed in the last week or so.

Not what you’ve produced, but how you produced it.

Look back at the week that has just passed by and how you applied the tools you’ve learned so far. What would you improve? How could you make it more effective for you?

This is called the My Personal Scrumban© Sprint REVIEW.

In the lesson I guide you through a few questions that will make you more effective and self-conscious.

Enjoy!

Great! You reached your final goal! Time to deliver your results and celebrate! After all the intermediate checkpoints, this is where we wanted to arrive. In the lesson I show you what it looks like and how to pass the finishing line in a safe and effective way.

Besides, let’s look back now at the whole process since we started. What have we learnt? Should we start it again, what would we improve? Do we want to expand on the results we’ve produced so far, or shall we get ready for a new and more challenging objective?

Let's see how the concepts explained in this section have been applied in a real life case.

Let's now go through all the steps we've described in the course in a single meaningful flow.

Congratulations, You Did It!

Now it's time to apply the concepts to your activities and daily life!

But before you go - Is there anything you would improve or enrich in the course? If you enjoyed the ride and you would like to suggest the course to your friends, leave me your comment and a great review!

Thanks for watching, and Stay Agile 4 Success!

Let’s build up the notions we got in the Kanban section. A few suggestions more to make an even more effective prioritization.

At the end of the day, no matter how big your effort has been, the measure of your success is only the value you’ve been able to deliver. Let me elaborate the concept in this lesson.

Yep, we already touched this concept in the course. Now I show you some more evidences to back it up.

For personal use, tracking time may be useful to improve our effectiveness over time. Let’s see how smart teams do it the agile way, and if it may work for us as well.

In the document I share several links of personal productivity tools that can be used to apply the concepts of My Personal Scrumban© either online or on your devices.

I've created this lecture right after the request of one of the students of this community, who wanted to know a bit more about how the concepts of this course apply not only to personal productivity, but also to the management of Agile Teams.

In this lesson I'll touch briefly on how Agile Teams are characterized, and how they differentiate themselves from traditional project teams. Then, I'll show you how the concepts you've learnt along this course in relation to personal productivity apply to teams and family management, and finally I'll suggest you a few more interesting and engaging resources about this subject.

This is an incomplete and growing list of Productivity Hacks. It will grow up also with your help. Do you have something more to share? Let us know in the comments, we’ll add it right there below.

Enjoy!