Phase One is finished

I mentioned before that we have an 'agile' planning process for our work (house and land).
It does sounds a bit sad I know. However we find that it helps us not panic about the amount of work we have to do. As well as keeping us focused on one thing and seeing it through to completion rather than dotting around as we see things that need doing.

These are the basics of our process.

• Work is divided in to phases which have a number of headline goals
• We have a backlog of work on post-its - whenever we think of something that needs doing we add a 'story' (even if it won't be done for years)
• We also have a list of 'BAU' tasks ('Business As Usual' which is a sad hangover from working in IT/banks - it just means all the normal things you have to do to keep your business running, for us cooking, mowing the lawn, cleaning the chickens, hoovering, shopping, changing the bed, etc etc)
• Each story has a size estimate (XS, S, M, L, XL) and points are allocated to each size (XS - 0.5, S - 2, M - 3, L - 5, XL - 8)
• At the start of the week we chose the top priority stories in our backlog and make sure they all have a size allocated. We have a history of how much we are likely to get done in a week (burn down rate) so we limit the number of stories to somewhere in the region of this figure.
• Daily we have a morning 'stand up' meeting to decide what we are doing that day and make sure that completed stories are marked as completed. We also discuss what things have issues or are blocked and what we should do about them.
• At the end of the week we have a review of the week (good, bad, ideas, questions) and add up the total number of points achieved.
• BAU tasks don't have points allocated because there is an approx steady amount of that to be done leaving the rest of the time free for 'project work'. The purpose of the points system is to allow us to select only the number of stories we will have time to fit in around the BAU work. Sometimes there are bigger than normal tasks such as strimming the drive which although they are a regular part of 'running the farm' get points allocated otherwise they skew the results.

After the arrival of the sheep we are now ready to declare Phase One complete (they are part of 'a stitch in time').
Phase One had the following goals:
Fit for human habitation - eg getting water and then hot water
A stitch in time - Fixing a number of urgent things that were going to become bigger problems, mainly around keeping the land under control eg getting cattle and sheep to graze bits of it plus getting strimmer and lawn mowers and using them
First cultivation - This was about getting some things planted this year even though we didn't hope to become self sufficient so soon we have a lot to learn and the sooner we got on with it the better.

This is all the end of week reviews stuck on the wall with the stories done in that week on the paper along with our thoughts about what went well and badly and ideas/questions for improving going forward.

We can see that our run rate (or burn down rate) reduced massively in the period after getting Poppy to less than half what it was before her. It is now up near the previous rate.


We have now progressed on to planning what Phase Two means. Having completed Phase One doesn't mean we have finished all the stories we have on the backlog which include things we might not get round to for years. This is the backlog off the board and the current week on the board (not everything is on the backlog yet and many of the stories on there will be broken down in to multiple more managable stories or tasks when the time comes.

One of the goals for the next phase is going to be getting some of the boxes moved upstairs. This will involve getting some initial work upstairs done such as insulation (which has dependencies because we need to have any veluxes and venting done before the insulation as well as some of the electrics) before we move them as they would get in the way otherwise.
We will also have things about planting some more things (that need to be got in before winter) and protecting the pump (which means installing a new larger tank at the spring with a detector to turn off the pump when it is empty)