Apologies to Nike, but I've just got a new Agile slogan.
Just DON'T Do It.
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I just deleted 5,000 words from the last quarter of my business novel Rolling Rocks Downhill.
I replaced it with a brand new 1,400 words.
OMG it hurt.
The deleted stuff was some of my most interesting and best written work.
But it just doesn't belong.
I had to kill it.
For the sake of the book. And my readers.
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Editors have this expression: kill your darlings.
It hurts ... oh, how it hurts ... but you have to do it to make your product better.
It's a shame I had to write all those words before I killed them.
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That's how we used to rescue waterfall projects - by descoping. It was painfully costly, inelegant and unproductive - getting rid of a whole lot of half-written code. It left the code ugly and hard to work with. No one liked it. But it was our only option.
Which is why we got rid of waterfall.
In Agile, though, descoping is extremely elegant:
Just DON'T Do It.
Delete it from your backlog.
Don't start it.
Start the next project instead.
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Don't just "groom your backlog", prune it, thin it, slash it, trash it ... just don't do (most) of it.
Do this instead, now: chop your backlog in half. Finish early for a change. Start the next project early.
Then get someone to kill your pet projects for you. Put them out ofyour misery.
Steve Jobs saved Apple by drawing a 2x2 grid, labelled the rows "consumer" and "pro", labelled the columns "portable" and "desktop", then killing the projects which didn't fit.
Each one of those projects was someone's darling.
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You won't do it will you?
