101 All Time Great Stories Pdf Free Download
Bran Bast
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If there is one thing I have learned in the past four years, it is the power of storytelling. Everyone loves a good story, not only for the great feelings but for the impact great stories can have on us to make us better people and do great things. I never understood the true power of telling stories until I ventured into the tech space. In today's newsletter, I want to share three unique personal experiences over the last few months that have made me an unrepentant storyteller.
Furthermore, anyone who knows about my community-building efforts beyond LinkedIn may have come across some of my short videos where I have a comedic take on health issues using Nigerian comedy parlance to push health advice. In the last six months, I have received many personal messages expressing gratitude for sharing these health tips and how these stories change their health behaviours. In this regard, I also have a friend and colleague (Aproko Doctor) who mentored me in this area and together, we boldly attested to the millions of lives changed. All because we tell health stories.
Finally, a little while ago, I told a documented story about a company and their efforts to provide health access in Africa. I believe they are doing a fantastic job because that was the simple truth. A little while after we told that story, the CEO invited me to a lovely lunch meeting. It was a very fancy lunch. Later during that meeting, I learned about the story of a particular investor that had eluded him for about three years. He finally got an approving nod from him after we told their story. Behold, it was a six-digit investment in US dollars.
Stories are effective instruments for change. A famous proverb says, "You're never going to kill storytelling because it's built in the human plan." Furthermore, as Laura Holloway once said, "Storytelling is our obligation to the next generation." She also says, "Give something of meaning to your audience by inspiring, engaging, and educating them with a story. Stop marketing. Start storytelling."
If there is anything I want you to take from today's newsletter (other than my storied experiences) - Never be afraid to tell your own story. Somebody somewhere in the world is desperate to hear it. Tell your story, and the world will be better for it.
My name is Sean, and I was an intern with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) during the winter of 2020. As an avid hiker and passionate conservationist, I was thrilled to finally have an opportunity to volunteer on the Appalachian Trail for the first time! I did not know what to expect but after taking my light car part-way down a rugged dirt road I met with Potomac Appalachian Trail Club volunteers who were leading the volunteer work trip
My name is Amanda. My daughter Yahaira and I recently participated in our first-ever A.T. volunteer experience helping with boundary monitoring and maintenance. It was a great first experience for us, and hopefully the beginning of many more to come.
Yahaira enjoyed finding the boundary markers and even found a missing monument which she thought was pretty awesome. She also had fun re-painting the boundary markers on the trees. For me, I loved being out in the woods. It is really my happy place. The exercise and conversations were the highlights of my week.
Ready to create your own first experience as an A.T. volunteer (or add to your growing list of awe-inspiring volunteer stories)? Find an A.T. volunteer opportunity today at appalachiantrail.org/waystovolunteer.
Every time I walk into their sprint planning session, I do not like what I see. It's absolute silence and we can practically hear ourselves breathing. The SM is the only person talking and tries to create tasks, one-by-one, for each story.
I try to encourage the PO and developers to ask questions, but I have developers who are very "passive" (not pro-active). No developer will voluntarily request to be assigned a task (like I use to do and have seen done by so many of my peers). They sit and almost wait to be assigned tasks (which was how it was before I introduced Agile).
Our sprint planning sessions are WAY too long (almost a full day) for a two week sprint. There is a lot of wasted time discussing things that should probably have been ironed out before the session by the PO.
I just want all the boilerplate work to be done before developers and others join the session. Having everyone sit through several minutes per story watching the SM create and name tasks, set the JIRA fields, etc. is entirely counter-productive.
b) Ask the Scrum Master to stop talking ;), to stop entering stuff to JIRA during the planning meeting. He should facilitate the meeting and encourage developers to do this work and not do this instead of them.Give pens and postit stickers with story names to developers and let them write on a sticker the tasks for that story. And take the keyboard from Scrum Master. He does not need it during the meeting. Give it to someone else.
The tasks like: design, tests, review should be a part of general Definition of Done of the team. I do not think it is needed to put them to the story during planning. It depends on what is the goal of adding them there - to have them visualized so that the size of the story can be estimated well or just to have a checklist if all the steps were done.
If it is needed for estimation and the team prefers to have it written down, then it is fine. If the team do wants to have those tasks in JIRA to have kind of checklist (do they want? or you want it? :)) then a developer when starting to work on a story can add those generic tasks. During planning it would be enough to mention it - that's something that SM can do: "guys remember that you need unit tests as well".
In my team tasks added to a story during planning session are more like: add a new button to screen A, create a new screen B, create a new db table, improve the SQL query. We put "unit tests" tasks usually when we know that in a specific story we expect a lot of effort in making/maintaining unit tests. Usually we do not write down "unit tests" task to a story as we all know it needs to be done.
This is the common problem which was faced by everyone who are new to Agile. Because Agile is more about taking ownership and resposiblity which was lacking in other methods. To answer your question..
Before you goto Sprint Planning Meeting, Business Analyst and Product Owner should have discussion and priortize the list of features which you have according to your business needs. Before prioritizing the Business Analyst should break down the features into small task and with PO these should be prioritized. In this way when you go for Sprint Planning Meeting you can avoid time in discussion which features to be address.
To bring in more involvement from your developers, you should first teach them how Agile works. Make them understand you are suppose to take ownership. It can be done in a simple way, in your initial meetings please avoid people from Management team, make your dev team feel confortable, make sure that what ever they speak its not going to communicated to Management team. May be initial days you can give them some time say them these are features according to priority go back do effort estimation and let the team know how much time you need, who works on which feature etc. This way you can make them involved.
Like other responses have indicated, it's really about ownership. In my experience, developers really like to solve problems - it's what brings them satisfaction in their work. Usually when I see a low level of interaction, it's because the developers feel like they're being giving a list of things to do and they're just acquiescing. That may or may not be what's happening, but I've never seen a case of low involvement where that wasn't the perception.
This is the same problem that waterfall has. Tier 1, business leadership, decides on some requirements and passes them down with Tier 2, the PMO, then they make tasks and give them to Tier 3, the developers, which make them, then we go back up the chain and hope whisper down the alley didn't happen.
The key is that all levels are engaged at the same time. The project should start with the team getting a high-level view of what they're trying to accomplish in the project, then as you approach each section, before you get into sprint planning, you vet ideas and requirements with team members (doesn't have to be all of them if you've got a big team. Your goal is to get involvement and buy-in, not kill productivity). For example, if you intend to tackle user feedback next sprint, a few days before it, have the product owner take the team to lunch and say "I need users to be able to give feedback with a single click from any page" - or whatever the high-level need is - "Like this site does - what do you guys think? How could we make X happen?" Take that conversation and iron out some basic stories to work from during sprint planning. Now you've got the idea in their heads for a few days, they've got some ideas rolling, and they come into sprint planning knowing what they'll be talking about and ready to share some solutions.
Disclaimer: I know this kinda breaks scrum because you're allowing POs and stakeholders to take the team off task. In my experience, the benefits of getting the team to buy in and own the solution far outweight the fact that you're taking them off task for a bit. That being said, it's something to be aware of and to control - if it starts getting out of hand, reel it back in.
This also can work really well if it's not common in other meetings Project kickoffs and release planning, for example, are great places to start these conversations too. Spending extra time to do discovery and brainstorming activities in broader planning sessions like release planning can really pay off throughout the project.
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