I have recently started transitioning my career to working for myself and at my own pace. Most of my projects are now one man initiatives. I start each project with the same mistake. I know exactly what needs doing so no plan is needed. I’m always wrong.
These one-man projects are the development of my courses on Udemy (IT Strategy, Raspberry Pico C), IoT device development, home improvement, and the development of this blog. They range in size and complexity from a few days to nine months.
Each of these projects starts well with huge enthusiasm for what I am going to achieve. As you work you build up a list of things undone, the things I need to do, and the things I haven’t thought about enough yet. That to-do list begins to get too big. Suddenly my time is spent thinking about what I might need to do is taking more of my time than working on making progress. What I need is a plan.
The planning myth starts with the thought “I know what I am doing and don’t need to waste time planning”. I’ve worked with a lot of developers and architects in my career. I’ve noticed that this myth is quite common. When the project is one man or a very small team then this myth becomes the strategy. The result is that we fail to deliver on time and quality. For the very simple reasons, we didn’t plan to succeed.
I am not going to propose this is a fall waterfall planning approach with Ghantt charts and everything. We do though need enough planning to get the work done. My preference is to use an Agile approach. At the heart of this, I need a prioritised to-do list of work. Somewhere I can put the future work items I don’t need to worry about today, but do need to remember. A list that can help me finish the top item before starting the next, so I will not have everything in flight.
In an Agile approach I use a Kanban board broken into four columns:
- To-do: Prioritized and sorted list of items I need to get done. Called the backlog in agile speak.
- In progress: the one or few items I am working on.
- Done: The items I have finished
- Complete: I like to review what I have achieved at the end of the week and make sure quality was achieved. Therefore I like to move the items from Done to Complete at this point. If nothing else it gives me a high for what I have achieved
This approach has a flaw for me, and one I have commonly seen others share. The items we are adding are not all the same size. Some can be done in hours, and others may take weeks or longer. Some may be components of another item. We need some structure.
Personally, I work in one-week cycles. So on Monday, I work out what my week looks like and on Friday I confirm what I have achieved. So I want items on my to-do list that can be completed within this time. Really I am looking for to-do items which will take hours to a day or two to complete. That way I feel like things are moving forward. That is vital to my mental health on a one-man project.
Items which I can fit within a week-long delivery cycle I will call user stories, following the agile term. Items that will take longer than a week, perhaps up to six weeks I will call a feature. Features are then broken down into a number of user stories. I don’t necessarily break them all down at once, enough to keep my to-do list healthy and satisfy my mind that when I have an idea I have it covered on the list and can stop worrying about it.
Sometimes my ideas are a bigger piece of work than I can do in six weeks elapsed. I use the agile terms of Epic for these. These break down into features. There are a lot fewer of these and sometimes I use these just to group features into themes, such as quality review, or video editing stage of my course development.
I’m an IT geek and of course, I use tooling to help me. I started off using Trello or Github plans to hold my Kanban board. The problem with these is how you manage the features and Epics. So even for a one-man project, I need a slightly more grown-up approach. Some people like Jira but I have chosen to use Azure Boards. This handles the user stories, features and Epics with an intuitive interface.
In any project of more than a few days of effort the thought “I don’t need to plan” is a myth. It wastes time creating chaos which I then have to unwind into a proper plan of action. Things are always faster if I start with a planned approach, and help me to achieve the end goal. Tooling helps a lot and for me, Azure Boards is the way to go right now.
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