G’day, training & certification community! Last week, I let you know about our brand-new free course called Beginner’s Guide to Agile in Jira, designed by excellent person @Andrew DeBell.
Inside that course is a tip sheet listing six concrete ideas to help you build your agile mindset. We want to hear from you with your real-life experiences putting these ideas in action.
This post is the fifth in a six-part series (check out posts one, two, three, and four!). In each, I’m sharing one of the tips, and you can comment on this post below with how you’ve put it into practice in your professional life. Our plan is collect our favorite advice in one post, then share it back with you—and put it on our website, for other folks to learn from.
Also: We’ll be awarding something special to our most engaged users throughout the series! 👀 🥳
Ready to get started with the fifth tip?
Tip #5 to Build your Agile Mindset: Your work doesn't have to be perfect
Your goal is to deliver something that works; an MVP. Not to make every detail perfect.
Shift your mindset to focus on doing "good enough" work, and then get immediate feedback to improve the next version. Try to adopt this approach for both large and small tasks.
"Good enough" is different for every team and every project. If the parameters are not clear, you may want to discuss them with your team leader.
The perfectionism monster comes for many of us. I’ll be the first to say this tip is a welcome reminder!
^ live footage of all of us, on some days, amirite?!
Now, answer these questions by adding a comment below:
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Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re not over-focusing on perfection to the detriment of an MVP?
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Where do you have room to improve in perfectionism?
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Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you fight perfectionism?
I’ll go first, to get you started with an example.
Can you tell us about a method you use to make sure you’re not over-focusing on perfection to the detriment of an MVP?
As a writer it is hard to let people look at your first drafts, but I’ve found that I can save myself and my colleagues a ton of time if I show someone a first draft—if not an outline, even!—to ensure that we’re in the same ballpark of what is needed before I dive into the nitty-gritty language (and GIF-finding) work. To be honest, it still stings when folks catch simple mistakes in those drafts, but I try to remember that efficiency matters more than my little big ego—and that collaboration is the name of the game for agile teams!
Your turn—how do you fight the perfectionism monster?
