In my personal capacity I’ve had an initiative that’s been open with just about no progress for a couple of months: I’m having to vacate my home office to make way for my daughter’s new room.

Great spot, but it has to go

A big reason for the lack of forward progress is: I can’t see a sustainable solution just yet. I’m often away at client sites during the day and tend to do office work in the evenings. External offices don’t work for me as time spent there is time away from my family in the precious few hours I have before my daughter’s bedtime. The other option is to ‘MOVE TO A BIGGER PLACE’ as I am prompted regularly by all my friends. This brings other challenges into the picture: as an example try to find a reasonably priced spot with four parking bays in our school district! Or that we have a killer bathroom that took me the better part of a year to get right. The thing is – we’re happy and we don’t want to move so the solution has to be found within the available space constraints.

I’m also anxious about losing my place of refuge. The office is my quiet spot in a house shared with two females and several hundred cubic meters of (typically) joyful chatter. But I had promised my daughter her own room and that’s a sacred covenant. Tick-tock-Tick-tock…

I had an epiphany while driving several days ago: “I had the wrong methodology in mind!”. I was thinking of the initiative as a waterfall project: see the solution in its entirety and then do a big up-front plan for its execution. The fact that I couldn’t see the full sustainable solution stopped me from making ANY progress on this front. The realization was that I was running an unpredictable change management initiative. It demanded an agile delivery approach. I needed to make a few small changes and try those on for size, then use this experiential feedback to elaborate the solution in bite sized chunks.

Eat my own dogfood!

Take a step back to think about the irony here: (a) I own an agile management coaching practice (www.crossbolt.com) and (b) I regularly run projects where the full solution was not known up-front.

I shopped around online for a virtual SCRUM board so that I could quickly smash out some user stories and tasks. For the uninitiated, SCRUM is a project management process that allows for a solution to be advanced in small increments. The guys at Scrumy.com have done a truly wicked job.

1. It took me 30 minutes to whack out a full plan of what was known.
2. I made substantial progress in my first day following the plan.
3. You folks all get a ringside seat right here: www.scrumy.com/officerelocate
4. While I haven’t completely solved the problem yet, what I have already is working quite nicely

Satellite office 1

This blog entry was done in satellite office 1. I haven’t got my wicked Aeron chair yet but the Big Mac and I have gotten off to a rocking start.