Too Many Broths Spoil The Cook
I' ve got several things bubbling over at the moment and because I never bothered capturing them as stories and placing them in a backlog I'm really struggling to make headway with any of them. Some are personal experimentation, others are professional and finally there's a few projects which may end up as open source.
So what's stopping me making this backlog? It's the lack of a single coherent customer to do the prioritisation of course. I could certainly pull out all the things I want to do into a set of stories, but would it be right for me to also play the customer role? I certainly don't want to ask my work to do the prioritisation, since I know which side of the fence they'll lean on...
I think my personal challenge is quite similar to many projects I have witnessed where there has not been a single customer. It becomes extremely difficult to prioritise stories and deliver a single useful end to end feature and instead we deliver lots of little bits and pieces. Of course, switching contexts in itself is extremely expensive in terms of productivity, but unless there is a single customer, with clear goals and a solid backlog of well expressed stories then switching contexts is inevitable.
What do I plan to do? Well first and foremost I'm going to take the baby-step of at least creating my backlog of stories... By definition, these are my stories, so in reality I am the customer, I guess I'm just like all other customers, I'm not a very good one and I like to keep changing my mind - oh well...