Rock and Roll Agile – Part 1
So often I find that life outside of work follows a similar cadence to life at work. Such was the case when I realized my band had been playing together for years and still had not a played any shows (Not counting an annual street party).
One of the reason people are in a band is to play shows. It might be to record music or just to jam (play music often changing songs or making them up as you go). Now my reason for being in a band was to play music live on stage. I love being in front of a crowd, something anyone who has seen me run a presentation or a workshop can attest to. But what were the reasons of the rest of the band. They were still coming out once a week and working on songs with some progress.
Suddenly I saw the parallel, we were very much like a software development team who continued making software but never delivering it. Sure we had recorded a few songs and we had played at those street parties but it was just like almost releasing useful software. It doesn’t count unless you actually complete the tasks.
In the work place, I was a ScrumMaster turned Agile Coach so I began to apply Agile practices to our band. The first thing we did was have a band planning meeting. We talked about what each person wanted to get out of the band. What we hoped to accomplish. Why we were doing this. From this discussion, we put together a product backlog of sorts. We listed that we enjoyed playing music together, we like the original music that we being written, we wanted to play live and that we wanted to finish recording our half done album. This planning meeting focused us on our goals. We decided that we needed more songs to accomplish several of these tasks but instead of working on three new songs we worked on one. From our planning meeting we realized that we didn’t need to create a whole album. We could complete one song at a time and then release it on the Internet.
Like with all good plans change was about get involved.
Over the next few months we worked hard, wrote and completed three new songs and planned to record them when our drummer moved to Toronto (from Ottawa). Currently, our original drummer is rejoining us and we expect a smooth transition when we start up again.
I plan to bring some Agile practices such as adding visual tools of our plans to the band room so we can see the progress. Each practice (an iteration for us) has a purpose and a goal and we are going to work towards releasing more often. Next year I will try to reflect back on how well this has worked.
