Level Up: Scrum for Any Business with Torlando Hakes

Torlando Hakes, Owner of Color Theory, discussed how he has implemented Scrum in order to make sure his company’s daily operations run smoothly. He outlined his Scrum timeline and encourages the practice for all businesses, both big and small.

• Started company in 2008 during the Great Recession
  • Was handed the company after his boss left to get his MBA
  • Doubling sales every year, got tricky to learn the business end of things
• He told a friend that he thought his business was going to die
  • Time management and project management were difficult
  • Hiring someone to manage these things was even less helpful because they were not an industry expert, and it cost him more money
  • Growth leveled off, profit was negative, but he got out of this hole by implementing Scrum
• 2 paradigms
  • Are you a doer or a connector?
    • Doer: someone making product, seeing product, building product from scratch
      • Advantages & disadvantages of being a doer:
        • Problem solver, working, laborer, task-oriented, productivity-oriented, may not see big picture, stuck in the details
    • Connector: someone making deals, figuring out problem and figuring out solution, finding people to make this happen
    • Advantages & disadvantages of being a connector:
      • Connecting proper people to proper products, broader view, working with more parties, cannot make enough money unless you scale; if you effect millions, you make millions; can forget about the details and focus too much on broader connections
    • Figure out what you’re best at, figure out which you connect with better
    • There’s not enough time to be both
• How much work is enough?
  • As your business grows, stress level changes
  • $95K is ideal point for overall life satisfaction, according to research
  • Be ruthless in protecting your quality of life, don’t let your business overtake you
• What is out of control in your business right now?
  • Tons of tasks, wanting to make sure employees are okay
  • Time
  • Hard time saying no
  • Perfectionism
  • Paying per productivity
• Mental process for task completion
  • What is this?
  • Can I do it in 2 minutes?
  • Can I automate it?
    • Torlando teamed up with Periodic to create a scheduling program to automate scheduling (colorbook.site), no longer has to worry about scheduling sales appointments manually
    • The goal is for consultants and painters to be unencumbered by things a computer can do better and for them to be quintessentially human
      • Humans have time limits, but can be underutilized when it comes to their creativity and critical thinking
  • Can I delegate it?
  • When can I defer it?
  • Should this be a project?
• Torlando’s daily cycle (2 hours per day)
  • Clear out inboxes (it’s alright to wait, not many things are that urgent)
  • Job costing
  • Financial review
  • One marketing activity (can be big or small, as long as it gets done)
• Scrum team
  • 3 components
    • Project/product owner
      • Represents the stakeholder (advocates for them), typically the primary sales role
      • Local networker
      • Prepares and curates work order backlog and curates this
      • Communicates the scope of projects to the Scrum team
    • Scrum master
      • Serves the team, makes sure that the doers have time to do and aren’t bothered by connectors
      • Manages Scrum workflow
      • Can manage many teams at once
    • Production/development team
      • Self-directed and autonomous
      • Self-recruiting
        • Has recruiting power, they will never bring people on the team who won’t work hard or do good work
      • Ownership over current project
      • Manages project resources
      • 1-9 people per team
• Scrum workflow
  • Step 1) Project owner adds to and prepares the project backlog
  • Step 2) Hold the Scrum meeting on the first day of the sprint (digestible amounts of time, he uses 2-week periods) to discuss all project details and hand off job folders
    • Task board (job folder) should contain:
      • Project info
      • Detailed story or work order
      • Time budgets + burndown report
        • Assign a time for each task you must complete (the amount of work expands to the amount of time given for it)
        • Burndown report— take all tasks you have, track if you’re on time or not
      • Paperwork
      • Things that are: In the queue/in progress/done
      • Score card (use this to learn how to know if you’re winning or not)
  • Step 3) 10-day sprint— crew(s) of 1-9 work collaboratively and teams must rely on one another
  • Step 4) Daily standup— 15 mins at beginning or end of every work day
    • What did we do today?
    • What do we have to do tomorrow?
    • What stands in our way?
  • Step 5) Hold a retrospective meeting— recap the sprint; accept feedback and make improvements. Get availabilities for the following week.
• The problems you’re solving matter
  • What do people have to have or else?
  • Show your teams how they are impacting the world
  • Keep up the spirit

• Q&A
  • How do you define a time allocation for a given project?
    • Break down big things into smaller subtasks
    • To figure out scale of a project, each person on the team says how long they think it’s going to take and why, then they will come to a consensus and collaborate in order to determine the scale
  • If you underestimate amount of time needed, how do you deal with the extra time you have?
    • Pull more out of the backlog and work in a mini sprint

You can view Torlando’s Level Up slides here.