New Year. New You. (100 story points)

"So this is New Year. And what have you done?"

I found myself asking this during the long train journey between the capital cities of Scotland and England on Monday 2 January 2017.

"Well. I don't know really," I answered.

2016

2016 was a bad year for musicians, actors and global politics, but it was a pretty good year for me. I got myself settled into a new job at Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity. I rode a bike ride to Paris! There was fun (and board games), I was on TV and I visited 10 Downing Street.

2016. A bad year for global politics, but a pretty good year for me.

...and there was Scrum. I am a man with half a hip, so I'm not talking about Rugby, but instead a "15-minute, timeboxed meeting that allows a sprint team to provide updates and share solutions to problems".

Since attending Scrum Master training I've described myself as an "Agile nerd*". I really like that Agile project management accepts that life is complex and that there's limited use in making grand plans. Rather than planning big projects in intricate detail, Agile relies on a backlog of small tasks, the completion of which nudge the team (or person) towards a grand vision of utopia.

This utopia is never reached since the backlog of tasks will always grow, but just by completing the tasks the team (or person) gets better.

Where does this put me now?

Rather than set myself a loosely-defined New Year's Resolution, I have decided to live my life in an Agile** way. As I sat in seat B13, on the train back to London pressed between the darkened, chilly window of an Intercity 225 and a marketing person trying, and failing, to login to the train WiFi, I wrote my backlog in a notebook.

I've now moved this to a Google sheet, which I can access anywhere via my phone. I've assigned story points to each action (essentially just a "gut feel" of how difficult I think a task will be) and will prioritise the list.

I'll work through the list in two-week Sprints – lonely Sprints, since I will be Product Owner, Scrum Master and Development Team all at once, but Sprints all the same. At the end of each Sprint, I'd like to write a brief Sprint Retrospective and share it as a blog post – if I'm going to live Agile for a year, I may as well do it properly.

Perhaps I should add "Improve UX and appearance of backlog" to the backlog?

So, you've reached the end of my first post. And since I've reached the end of it, I can strike three story points off my sprint backlog.

*It has been pointed out to me that I don't really know what Agile is. And this is true – I've attended a two-day training course about being a Scrum Master, but this does not make me an expert (or even someone who is "quite knowledgable").

**Again, I do not describe myself as an expert in any way. I am just nerdy about it and interested to see how it can be used to make me a better adult.