It’s time for another Zan’s Challenge! These challenges are still to help spur your thoughts, strengthen your skills, or open your mind to new possibilities in Agile.

Today’s Challenge: Practice Simplification to Improve Agility

One of the core principles behind the Agile Manifesto is Simplicity:

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

In order to succeed, we all must learn to simplify what we are doing. It is never enough to just attack all the tasks and problems we may be faced with each day. There just are not enough hours in the day. We have to simplify the work we do, ensuring we get what needs to be done, done.

Here are some tips for simplification:

• Make a priority list: It’s important to know what is the most important thing to be done is. Figure out what must be done first.
• Understand the goal: If you don’t know what the goal is, and why the goal is important, you won’t know what to simplify.
• Check your status often: Once you start doing things in their order of priority, check in as you complete tasks and see if you have met the goal. Sometimes, you’ll find the goal actually met, and you won’t need some of the tasks you thought you did at first! Other times, you may need to alter your expected tasks once you have new information. Either way, eliminating unnecessary tasks leads to simplification.

Good luck with this challenge. Please let me know your results, what you think of this challenge, and if you have any ideas for future Zan’s Challenges!