What I "unlearned" in 2017

Photo by Matthew Spiteri on Unsplash
Inspired by this tweet I have decided to do a follow up to what I have learned in 2017, with what I have "unlearned"

I really like this idea, as looking back I suspect most of the time I’ve truly learned something I’ve been able to let go. In 2018 I am going to be much more mindful about whether fear or learning drives adding new ideas/skills/practices this year. I feel that it is much easier to layer on new skills while you learn them, without thinking about what in your tool kit is no longer useful ... or at least if the effort outweighs the benefit/impact of not doing it.

The main thing I have let go of this year has been no longer worrying about agile/scrum ceremonies and artifacts. Along with the main team I work with, I have moved to a much more flow driven way of working. Making the number of WIP items, and the value of the useful changes, the deciding factor on when to deploy to production. Because of the way the items fit together it generally works out at about 10 items, which may be a time-frame of about 4 weeks. We have deploys done to dev on each commit and for QA on a much more regular basis.

To put it really simply, the team pull work items from me as they need them and I then pull releases of working software as I want them. It hasn't completely eliminated the coordination and communication effort for planning time sensitive or urgent fixes. But now this activity only occurs as needed.

Other than that I don't think I have been deliberate enough in my learning to reflect on this over 2017. So that's something I've learned in 2018 already!

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