From the Business Desk is a semi-regular series that looks at some of the important factors in running a Small Fiber Arts Business.  This feature looks at how to leverage some new time and project management techniques from the Agile framework for small businesses.

As a small business owner, time is one of the most important assets that you have.  It is also one of the most limiting.  While other business areas like staffing or inventory can be expanded or invested in, there are only so many hours in a day (if you know how to change this, please let me know!).  Making effective use of your time for projects and operations is crucial for a well managed business to both succeed and grow.

Is this what agile means to you?

Scrum.  Kanban.  Sprint.  Agile.  You may have heard these phrases before in industry trade shows or in the media as the newest focus for tech companies to manage their time, projects, and resources.  While originally created for Software Development, the Agile Framework at it’s core can be applied to any business process or project; especially in the Fiber Arts industry where there are natural market segments and discreet work items like classes, designs, and projects.

While we here have written previously about project management, thinking about the Agile methodology more surrounds the what rather than the how.  The core elements of agile that a Small Business owner should most be aware of are Team Ownership of Work, Minimum Viable Product/Shippable Units, and Timeboxing.

Before diving into these a bit further, I wanted to provide a 30 second overview about Agile from a non-technical perspective.  Unlike traditional mindsets where work is done in an orderly, sequence of events, Agile revolves around breaking up the necessary work to be done into discreet work units, and then over a set period of time (commonly called a “Sprint”) delivering a piece of the work to the customer.  For example, if you are running an LYS the work could be a 4 week class on garment construction; each week/session could be a unique and discreet unit of work.  Now, with this background, let’s look a bit further at some of the tenants that could be applied to your business:

Team Ownership of Work:  Agile frameworks work best when a team of individuals with a variety of skills are empowered to come together to tackle a project or issue as a whole.  The team, rather than one individual, collectively has a say in how the work is preformed and ultimately delivered to the customer.  This is especially applicable to a Fiber Arts business, due to the muti-facted nature of the industry.

If you are looking to put on a specific fiber event like a Fiber Festival, your team could consist of folks with a deep knowledge of yarns and marketing, separate instructors with significant technique knowledge, and then a handful of us less crafty types with some of the more technical business knowledge.  By bringing the team into the decision-making process early on to determine what is and is not feasible (“scoping the work”), you and your business can be sure to have a better understanding up front of what you can (and more importantly what you cannot) accomplish in a given period of time.

Minimum Viable Product/Shippable Units: In the software development space, research has shown that the average user base only heavily utilizes 20% of all of the features of a software application, following the classic Pareto 80/20 rule.  Think about your business.  Are there certain key elements that always seem to attract the most customer base?  Do you have certain patterns that always seem to hit on what the customer wants?  Agile is built around focusing on identifying what those elements are, bundling them together to create the leanest possible unit for work to ship, and then working towards that.

Applying that principal to your business can dramatically help you drive your Return on Investment, as once you are able to focus on these areas, you are able to cut to the core of drawing in your customer base.  Then, once you have a solid project or process up and running supporting that desire to be taught a specific skill in one of your classes, you can enhance that with additional features that may apply to a smaller set of customers.  Doing this is following the tenant of breaking down your projects or work into smaller features called Shippable Units that can be developed in a shorter period of time.

Timeboxing: As mentioned at the beginning, managing your time effectively is crucial for any business owner.  As an example, I have allocated myself 60 minutes to write this article.  Following the Agile principal of timeboxing, a discreet amount of time is set aside for any one task, meeting, or work item.  When that time is up for the day, no matter at what state the project is in, you should stop and move to your next item.  Many different studies from business to medical have demonstrated that mulitasking is actually a misnomer, and the human brain loses efficiency when rapidly switching between tasks.

As such, being able to focus on one item at a time, like updating your website with your latest shipment of yarn or re-arranging your models for an upcoming trunk show, work it for a specific period of time, and then close out that piece of work before moving on can dramatically increase the efficiency in how an individual or team gets work done.  So when you have those daily team meetings, or find yourself bogged down answering your inbox, break up your task into specific chunks, and timebox them.  It may take you longer to accomplish that one task, but by knowingly addressing items one at a time you are able to accomplish a lot more work as a whole.

Overall, the Agile methodology is gaining traction in many large and medium sized corporations and is still being developed and tweaked as additional lessons are learned.  While this overview has just scratched the surface, it’s an interesting mindset to begin thinking about when approaching your business planning for the coming year.  For another approach on how to use some of these tenants, check out this great post from Agile Advice.  And with that, I’m timeboxing this post for today!

~ Mr. Turtle