Days around Christmas are extremely special.

You cannot do anything about release date! Everybody (?) has unique expectations about how it has to be. For this particular quality challenge, there is a lot of work to do. All that will often end up in stress and shouting rough words (sometimes worse).

What can You do about?

Analyze!

What do You have to do? Build up Your Backlog.

What are the inner dependencies to each other?
Remember: You need a tree to have “gifts under the tree”.
Gift parcels are needed, also.
But before that, You need a sparkling idea for a gift and so on …

Visualize!

A board might help. But how should it set up (Kanban, Scrum, Gantt?). However …

You might want to have a special “preparation” area to keep up with all that cooking, wrapping, preparing to have it perfect.
Feel free …

The value of the following board is the visualization of the target picture by setting up “release clusters” (days 1 to 3 in columns, time frames in rows).

You can also visualize estimated work in time-units and idle time that is needed to ripe in relation to a milestone (Christmas dinner at 7:00 PM!) – kind of Gantt-style.

Align!

By visualizing, You are able to align Your family-/friends-/relevants-team to reach Your shared goal (“perfect X-Mas!”)

• What do You/we need?
• Who needs what? Are we able to realize that?
• Who does what?
• What is still missing?
• Do we really want/need it?
• …

Enjoy!

I wish You peaceful, enlightened, merry Christmas …