The Key to Agility: Breaking Things Down

If you find you can't keep up with the world around you, then break things down.  Breaking things down is the key to finishing faster.

Breaking things down is also the key to agility.

One of the toughest project management lessons I had to learn was breaking things down into more modular chunks.   When I took on a project, my goal was to make big things happen and change the world. 

After all, go big or go home, right?

The problem is you run out of time, or you run out of budget.  You even run out of oomph.  So the worst way to make things happen is to have a bunch of hopes, plans, dreams, and things, sitting in a backlog because they're too big to ship in the time that you've got.

Which brings us to the other key to agility ... ship things on a shorter schedule.

This re-trains your brain to chunk things down, flow value, chop dependencies down to size, learn, and, move on.

Best of all, if you miss the train, you catch the next train.