Agile Observations from the Trenches

As I write these words, the first words written on this blog in a very long time, I cannot help but be keenly aware that there is likely no one left to read them.  But I will write them anyways, because they need to written.  It has been a long time since I last posted, and many hours have been spent between the time of that last post and now wondering why I left this blog abandoned.  It wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy the writing, it wasn’t because I thought I wasn’t doing a good job, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t getting any traffic.  The only reason I can seem to point to is that I was overly focused on only delivering a post that was perfectly polished, which often meant that each post took a fair amount of time researching and writing.  In other words, I had set the precedent for myself that in order for a post to make it on the blog, it meant committing to a fair amount of work.  This became the barrier that I failed to overcome, especially after a one week lapse turned into two.  Then that two week lapse turned into a month.  And so on.

So why am I returning?  Because I love writing this blog.  Even though it didn’t have a long life, I enjoyed doing it, enjoyed the feedback, and enjoyed the challenge.  But why am I returning now, rather than months ago?  Because of something I heard this past week at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando…Agile teams ship.  The simple way of stating that we cannot polish or procrastinate forever, we must ship, sometimes earlier than we would like, but we must ship.  So I must return, get over my self-inflicted precedent of only posting perfected posts, and get on with the business of sharing my thoughts and observations gathered from working with companies across the country and now across the globe (I was honored with the opportunity to teach several classes in Switzerland last week.)

And lastly, to anyone that may be reading these words, thank you for returning.  I promise to keep my blog out of any other comas in the future.

Bill

P.S.  Sad but true fact, as I was attempting to log in to write this post, it had been so long since I accessed the admin portion of my blog that I forgot my username and password.  I forgot how to login to my own blog!