Project creation is always about stress, with which you need to somehow get along. Strange customer edits, misunderstandings within the team, deadlines are quite common things that you can't run away from in IT. This means that you need to somehow make friends with stress - and try to make it work for your benefit.
In this article, I'll talk about why stress is a key metric when measuring a team's ability, how to meet stress KPIs, and what does cycling have to do with it?
How I realized stress
Let's start from afar. I am sure that each of you had such moments when you suddenly understood something - this is how life-changing insights happen. I also had such a moment - during a trip to Tai a few years ago.
I missed my plane in Bangkok and got stuck at the airport. So I suddenly found myself in another country without a return ticket, and it was a serious stress - considering that before that I had no experience of traveling abroad. In the end, I got there fine, although I had to fly 22 hours through China - of course, I had to get nervous.
This is what I looked like before I started cycling. Petting a tiger was less stressful than being stuck in an airport. Contact zoos no longer approve
This trip was a showcase. I felt a lot of emotional pressure, but still got out of the situation - I didn't let the stress break me down. After that, I realized that you can change your life and improve it by working with stress and trying to take it under control. When I was young, I read and got a little inspired by Palahniuk's ideas, but uncontrolled self-destruction began to seem ineffective after this incident.
How to measure stress and relieve it "scientifically"
Of course, stress cannot be measured in objective terms - but we can track how it affects work, mood and overall productivity. Those who play sports will understand what this is about. Excessive stress is like overtraining: you take on a lot of stress, do a lot of exercises, and as a result, instead of a mountain of muscles, you get burnout and a long recovery period.
If we continue the analogy with sports, for productive training, you need to do it in doses, giving the body a break for rest in time. So with stress - the main idea is to regularly knock down stress without accumulating it. This is also called " completing the stress cycle ."
But if in sports you can simply not engage in several days, then in life you will not be able to constantly take time off due to stress - you still need money for life, and the employer will not be happy with such behavior. I used to think that good quality whiskey would help me relax, but alcohol did not relieve stress levels.
Then I figured out why drinking is not an option: yes, alcohol can give you a brief feeling of relaxation, but over time it affects the nervous system, and you begin to react even more sharply to stress. In addition, alcohol affects sleep : it seems that it helps you fall asleep faster, but in fact, alcohol just "knocks you out" like anesthesia. Sleep is not fulfilling, natural sleep cycles break down and the proportion of deep sleep required for recovery of the body decreases.
Then I decided to try to find another interesting format for getting rid of stress. I've always been amazed by characters in films, such as Frank Underwood from House of Cards, who, after a hard day, rested with physical activity, which was clearly lacking in my lifestyle.
I tried different options: swimming, running, just fitness. During the first months I really liked the elliptical trainer, which engages the whole body and does not load the knees. But in the end, I was fascinated by cycling - since childhood I loved to ride in the mountains and quickly go through turns.
In fact, bicycles are a good choice from a scientific point of view: scientists have discoveredthat half an hour of low to medium intensity cycling helps you instantly feel invigorated, energized and productive. And if you suffer from burnout, chronic stress and fatigue, you can exercise three times a week for 30 minutes at a slow pace - and you should increase your strength.
I've noticed for myself how physical activity helps relieve stress at work. This was the starting point for improving the quality of my life.
To track my progress, I put myself "tests" from time to time. For example, he opened the cycling season last year with a trip to Tarusa: I rode at night in the rain to a corporate party and back on a bicycle - 37 km in each direction. Now such a route seems to me to be nonsense, but then everything seemed exciting.
Then I started looking for ways to cycle regularly and for a long time. After all, it is important not just to catch fire with something, but to create a system in which playing sports will constantly support my well-being. Here I decided to apply my project manager skills: instead of doing everything in a large project at once, it is better to break it down into the correct stages with adequate volume - and start “pedaling”.
Within a month, I began cycling to work regularly. It became part of the routine - I lived 10 km from the office, not too far away, and the bicycle became a full-fledged transport for me. In the same season, I drove from my relatives in the Smolensk region to my home in Moscow, 150 km a day.
The habit grew stronger. I rode my bike five times a week. If possible, I rode on weekends, if I wanted to visit something interesting, I chose a bicycle as a transport. At that moment, I started looking for ways to involve friends and colleagues in cycling in order to ride more than one - and I saw how cycling is like a team IT development.
The team I ride with. Everyone has a role to play here - someone scolds us for the wrong toe heights, and someone protects Merida bikes.
Cycling is a typical IT project
From the outside it may seem that cycling is more about singles, but this is not so. There are several roles, and here are some of them:
- Universal - a rider prepared in all respects. Rides well both on the plain and in the mountains.
- Miners are light and powerful riders who are good at climbing.
- Sprinters are explosive power on the plain. They are the ones who are rushing to the finish line.
- Gregari and Domestic - support group. Helping their team to win. Eminence Gray and Most Valuable Specialist in Cycling.
Despite the variety of roles, the main parameter is aerodynamics. An athlete who follows another athlete saves strength, and so on incrementally. Alignment quickly comes to the fore - just like in team development.
You can compare the strengths of different teams depending on the psychological and physical mood of the participants, how much they fit together. If there is no coordination, then it will not work to win the first places. The same is the case with IT: there are always people who do not share the corporate culture or who find it unpleasant to work with each other - and they complicate the work on projects. The only difference is that in sports it becomes noticeably much faster - and in development you can reach a state of complete confusion and failure of deadlines before you realize that something went wrong.
Cycling, like project development, is a challenging journey full of adventure. You can't do without well-coordinated work
Just like the commits in the master branch, the action of any programmer always comes before the action of another. And it is very important what we get at the input and what we give at the output - from this, as well as from the coordination of the actions of cyclists, will depend on how comfortable it will be for a person after us to work. And how much of his resources he will have to spend, including under the influence of stress.
For example, if we were assigned the task of "making an API", but the documentation was not given, then we will have to spend quite a lot of additional effort - and there will be a lot of stress. If at the "input" we received detailed injections, then the result will be achieved faster, and the stress will be less. Of course, not for every task we will be given all the necessary information - then it is better to allocate time to study the documentation or develop it, so that the whole team then works easily and harmoniously. It sounds unrealistic - but we have nothing to lose: after all, stress worsens the quality of life , but dreams do not.
Stress KPIs as a way to monitor productivity
Can stress be used to assess team capabilities? Quite.
Now in agile development methodologies, the concept of "clock" is used less and less and different "parrots" are used more and more - units of measurement that do not make sense in themselves. These can be the same story points that have been popularly discussed lately.
The main idea behind story points is that any task can be assessed as simple, complex, complex and chaos:
- Simple. Change config.
- Composite. Change config, change parameters.
- Complex. Write a library.
- Chaos. Resolve a conflict between developers.
Why is the story point evaluation good? The fact that she appreciates the very stress. There is a certain measured capacity, that is, the amount of stress that a team can withstand in a week. And then the manager breaks down this "stress KPI" into tasks that the team will manage to accomplish during this period.
Typically, managers assume that a person has 40 hours of work per week - and set tasks based on that. So often there is an overestimation of the team's productivity - the team lead puts in more tasks in the work week than people are actually able to complete. Indeed, in fact, a rare person can work 8 hours a day productively - the number of effective hours of work is actually less, and it is individual for everyone.
Any workout is stressful. If you want to become stronger, get a load, which causes fatigue.
Sprint volume can be described as the stress a team needs over a period of time. That is, the amount of work that the team will perform without overwork, burnout and vacations. Returning to cyclists, this is the speed at which a team can reach the finish line without loss or injury.
A team that has a constantly filled backlog and a constant composition will adapt its rhythm of work from sprint to sprint - and gradually, as coordination grows, increase the volume of tasks.
Of course, this process requires calibration. At first, during the sprint planning process, the team assumes that they have time to complete N tasks. The first couple of times - it feels like how much they can handle. Usually they overestimate themselves - then they have to lower their KPIs. Then you can adjust your plans based on historical data: if you made 70 out of 80 story points last time, they will take, for example, 73 in the next sprint.
Each task is a certain amount of stress that the team members take on.
But in order for the team has worked together and has grown, she should receive tasks that are suitable for her in strength, with which she is able to cope and feel that the tasks are not too easy.
There is no task ceiling: teams are different in size, they rate the unit differently (some rate a unit for half an hour, some for two hours). Sometimes teams reevaluate their story points every 6-8 sprints. But we must always remember that a story point is a "parrot" that cannot be transferred from team to team. Each team has its own scope of "parrots" and methods of their assessment, and you should not offer another team to immediately complete the scope of tasks of the first one - that is how story points do not work.
The main idea when using parrots in working with a team is to give it the right path to develop, not measure when the participants will break down. This also works in sports: the coach does not need to give the athlete a lot of exercise - the athlete must be high. Otherwise, he may lose his love for sports and the incentive for further development.
, ?
Stressed person = tired person. He may be motivated and enjoy his work, but he will definitely switch, get distracted, and his productivity will be lower. Determining your energy limit at the moment is a problem: the tomato timer does not display fatigue.
Cyclists have their own meters - a sensor that calculates power in watts using two objective indicators: torque and speed. If the power drops, then you are tired and overtrained - you need to rest.
It is, of course, more difficult to measure your stress - you need good reflection skills, the ability and habit to analyze your condition. I can suggest keeping a diary in an application, for example, Moodspace - this will help you keep track of how many tasks you perform during each day and what thoughts and emotions are associated with it.
Our weekly workout in Krylatskoye
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I hope that my post helped you look at stress from a new angle. Tell us in the comments what you think of story points and Stress KPIs - and how do you know if your stress level is too high?
Thanks!