Building Your Agile Mindset, Idea #5: Your work doesn’t have to be perfect

[#1]

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:

• 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?

• Where do you have room to improve in perfectionism?

• 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?

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Enroll today in the free course: Beginner’s Guide to Agile in Jira

Read the first post in the series: Tip #1: All about respect

Read the second post in the series: Tip #2: Communication!

Read the third post in the series: Tip #3: Look for ways to innovate

Read the fourth post in the series: Tip #4: Actively improve your skills

Read the sixth post in the series: Tip #6: Be ready to PIVOT

[Sam Nadarajan]

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?

2 things that have helped me in the past are:

1. Have a business requirement that you can compare functionality against. Business requirements are high level descriptions of what you need to accomplish as a business. If you can meet the business requirement - which is generally more vague than system requirements, then you can constantly evaluate proposed functionality against the requirement by asking - "Even though this is missing some bells and whistles, can this baseline functionality accomplish the business objective?"
2. Respect the time box. Recently I read about a company that had 6 week release cycles, and forced themselves to deliver functionality within that release cycle without carrying over. This arbitrary restriction helped them think through the functionality they wanted to deliver, and placing limits on time helped them focus on the must haves v. the nice to have functionality. Set time limits, and you'll be surprised at how much more you can accomplish without getting tangled in the weeds.

Where do you have room to improve in perfectionism?

I find value when my ideas/suggestions are accepted by the team, even if they aren't great for the long term health of a project. Accepting that my value is grounded more in trying to help the team as opposed to seeing my ideas get approved is a huge step in helping me find my self-worth and still ensure the team is meeting its objectives.

Do you have a trick to jog your memory or help you fight perfectionism?

To fight perfectionism, I will frequently engage other team members early on in a discussion about what I am working on. I will even pull them in before I have a first draft finished if I am writing, or share my development approach if I am coding. The sooner I can engage someone in whatever I am putting together, the less likely the parasite of perfectionism will voluntarily feed off my pride.

[Andy Gladstone]

Where do you have room to improve in perfectionism?

😧um - everywhere. I constantly remind myself that the goal is completion, not perfection. That is easier said than done, but I have made improvements in terms of my own expectations for projects and tasks. One area that I know I can and need to work on is in my contributions to our Confluence instance. I have perfection paralysis - which leads me to leave work in drafts instead of fully published. I need to get over the fact that others won't judge me on my imperfections, but will benefit greater from the completion of the work.