In the Agile Development world, there is a concept of “sprints” or rapid development cycles that promote the rapid creation of prototypes that can move a project toward success or failure faster. Sprints are done in a cycle that starts and stops at regular intervals. It does not matter if the team is ready, there is a ready, set, go attitude that happens each sprint cycle. All hands on, moving the project forward. When the sprint is over, an after action review can determine what went wrong, how to improve, where to revise, how to further speed up progress. If these are ran correctly, the key point is that they will propel forward a project and prevent a bunch of hand wringing blue print creators from stalling, delaying or over building a path to success. In sprint cycles, you accept failure as part of the course. Hoping for incremental improvement rather then perfection at the outset.
In the 90s, object oriented design helped us take a leap frog jump into reversing the productivity paradox that occurred after the initial gains that computing enjoyed by solving singular and linear functions. With a better model for understanding the real world, programmers made rapid improvements. However, it took a couple of decades for practice and mentalities to shift and now here we are. The agile manifesto has taken root and we are seeing the result of an explosion of software development disrupting and altering our very lives, how and where we work and how we interact with our world. The sprint cycle is at the core of this success and nowadays it is the ideal to shoot for. Imagine that. Companies are trying to develop a process where failure is embraced rapidly. We have come a long way, for sure.
So have I. My sprint cycle starts tomorrow. I maintaining my 365 commitment, but I have implemented intermediate objectives via a 12 week (3 month) sprint cycle. The key point is that the sprint starts tomorrow. It does not matter how prepared or unprepared I am. Tomorrow I ride at dawn. Time to get sprinting! I will document my progress in this blog and on my other project that I have created. More on that later. For now, I am ready to get going and see what my next failure looks like!
Guy Reams
