Tidying Up Agile

So the big craze right now is, “Tidying Up.” The show is based on watching people go through the, “KonMari,” process that Marie Kondo created.

Over a year ago, I picked up a copy and read it. I loved its direct nature and it’s lightness at the same time. It was very clear in its directions, yet extremely simple. So simple that it seemed ridiculous.

This is very similar to my experience when people look at many agile frameworks. Scrum is often described as simple but hard. Also, that Scrum’s simplicity betrays its difficulty.

So how does the KonMari process work and how can we compare and contrast it to agile teams?

The Process

Gather everything

So there are a set of categories to work through, but for each category you take all of the items in that category and pile them up in one place. The idea is that by seeing it all together, you begin to appreciate the sheer volume of things that have accumulated and put yourself in a position to better ask what is really important in your life.

For agile teams, this is an interesting concept that we express often through our planning and refinement meetings, but let’s go further.

Take a Product Owner. They are collecting input from customers, stakeholders, developers, managers, and so-on. This input winds up in a backlog that grows faster than it goes away.

What if we took all of those items, printed them, and piled them all up for us to see? My guess is that the people who saw it would have a similar reaction that many do in the show. They would experience a mixture of emotion and a realization that we don’t need all of this, and we have no idea how we got here.

Does it Spark Joy?

The next step is for each item, hold it and ask if it sparks joy?

Often in the show people ask what that looks like. Marie shows an example of her holding a piece of clothing and bouncing happily that she has it. She points out that this is how she feels when it sparks joy, and something like that will happen for them too.

Decide if it sparks joy and keep the ones that do. Thank the ones that don’t and get rid of them.

A common struggle in the show is with recognizing that some things still have use or might still have use. My experience with this is that even for things like socks or a towel, why not take a moment and consider a towel that makes me happier? We threw out all of our towels and bought new ones. We found towels that added to our life beyond drying us off.

Back to our Product Owner. They pick up each item they’ve piled up and ask, “Does this spark joy?” Well, we can make the argument that this is the prioritization process in a nutshell. The interesting bit is that it is setting a fairly high bar for how to prioritize. Sparking joy is a lot different than a feature. It’s different than a bug fix.

I’m actually pretty comfortable with this being a question that a Product Owner considers as they work a backlog. Imagine a product that was built because every single thing brings joy. That is a thought worth considering.

For each of the items that don’t spark joy, thank them and the people who brought them, and get rid of them. I don’t mean put them in the backlog. I mean delete them. Tidy up that backlog.

Organize

The last part in the process is to give everything a home and keep it there. Marie Kondo shows numerous organization ideas and demonstrates how to fold clothes. There is something intentional in the way she does this though.

Everything she does when organizing is meant to be visible.

Nothing is shoved to a back of a drawer, nothing exists that requires rummaging. Everything is elegantly placed where it is easily seen amongst its neighbors.

Take a kitchen drawer as an example. She puts smaller boxes in the drawer to separate various things. She keeps similarly sized things together in their smaller boxes. Open the drawer and you immediately know the larger things are on the right and they work down. You could close your eyes and find things by their boxes and order.

Imagine a scrum team that took this degree of visibility to their work and information that they live with. No more questions of what email that specific bit of info was in, or what documentation repository to put things in. Being intentional in designing a way to visually see where the important things are would surely make for a happier and more productive workplace.

She recommends further that as you make these decisions that you make the commitment to keep them there. Houses get untidy when we don’t put things back in their home after that. There is a lot less effort to put things back where it goes than to find a place for it in the first time.

We often talk about things like Definition of Done and Ready for teams. The standards we hold as we do excellent work. Can they not be adjusted to put things in their home? Can keeping a tidy home of software be part of our responsibility?

Final Thoughts

The internet is having a great time poking at the show and having fun teasing about its simplicity when taken to extremes.

For me, when I think about organizations and teams I can’t help but think that we can learn from this method.

The potential is pretty incredible: Work in a place that sparks joy.