Scott Porad

Following up on yesterday’s post about how to make successful New Years Resolutions, I wanted to add some wisdom from the Agile community.

As background, Agile is a software development methodology.  One part of Agile is that you take a big project and break it up into little pieces.  (Have you heard this before?  The journey of a thousand miles takes a million steps.)  Agile refers to each of these little pieces as “stories”.

INVEST is a heuristic for writing good stories.  In other words, it’s a way to effectively break the big journey up into little pieces.  What is INVEST?

• Independent
• Negotiable
• Valuable
• Estimable
• Small
• Testable

Let me try to illustrate each of these:

Independent — Make each goal independent of your others goals.  Simply put, creating dependencies makes things harder to achieve.

Negotiable — Don’t make your goals so specific that you’re locked into plans that can’t be made.  Be flexible.  Compare these examples, “I resolve to exercise for 60 minutes per week” versus “I resolve to exercise Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings for 20 minutes”.  Suddenly you’re too busy with work on Wednesday and now you’re beating yourself up for not keeping your resolution.

Valuable — One very good way of creating resolutions that will fail is to create resolutions that you don’t value.  Be honest with yourself: if you don’t care about improving your health, then you’re not going to exercise…neither “get in shape” or “go to the gym this week” will be successful resolutions.

Estimable — If you can’t figure out what it’s going to take to achieve the goal, then it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to find the time to do it.  When can you schedule “get in shape” on your calendar…between 5-6 on Tuesday?  Unlikely.  “Go to the gym this week” can be estimated…it will take one hour, so it can be put on the calendar.

Small — If you read this space, you know I’m an advocate of smaller efforts resulting in greater success.  “Get in shape” is a big goal, but “go to the gym this week” is small.  Small goals can be achieved, crossed off a list, and feel good…it feels good to succeed…success begets success.

Testable — How will you test or confirm that you’ve achieved this goal?  “Get in shape”….what does that mean?  When have you achieved that?  “Go to the gym once per week” is very testable…you can prove to yourself and others that it has been achieved.  (Be careful—Testable can cross swords with Negotiable leading to pitfalls.)

Obviously, there is no perfect resolution, but INVEST provides good guidelines for creating resolutions that will succeed.