Happy Friday,

This week I moved most of my beehives to a new location. I knew it would be challenging, but it turns out that was me being optimistic. As I sit here this morning, I'm reminded of how similar this is to new projects.

To move beehives, you go to those hives when the sun isn't up. Typically, this would be near dusk/dawn. From there, you seal the hives, use a strap to hold them together, and then move them.

But like most things, the devil is in the details.

After the sun went down, the bees were out "bearding" on the hive. That means they're just all over the outside of the hive. It's how they cool off. Having them in the hive is a requirement, so I had a dependency problem.

A little water or smoke will fix this, but agitate the bees.

Did you know that many styles of beekeeping veils don't seal up at all? They just have an elastic that loosely cinches around your neck and shoulders. This is fine when bees aren't after your and they're flying.

At night, they're mean, and they crawl. I had to walk away constantly as bees actively tried to get under my veil. This was a costly interruption.

Sealing the hives proved challenging, too because this is one of those times you have to do things quickly because the bees will wise up to you and pour out. I used a combination of tape and paper towels to plug the entrances.

Know how hard it is to get tape to behave when you're wearing thick gloves? Hard enough to give the bees plenty of time to escape and attack. This reminds me of a type of error that happens when early assumptions in a project lead to costly issues down the road.

Lastly, we have a light issue. I brought several lights and headlamps. The hiccup is that lights inside the veil shine onto the veil, meaning you can see the inside of your veil really well, but not much outside. This left me effectively blind for a lot of the work I was doing. This is a case of knowing we need something to succeed but being wrong about the specifics and having to muddle through.

This process took from 9 pm to 1:30 am because of all these small things going wrong. I had bees attacking me at all times. One even got inside of my suit and stung my knee. I'm in bed writing this because my knee has swollen up so much I can barely walk. In higher-pressure projects, lots of us come away with injuries, and they aren't always visible.

I think that we all know why most projects have bumps and issues along the way, but we are also usually pretty optimistic that those same things won't happen again. When we realize the devil is in the details, we can spend more time planning upfront, which only works if we guessed right, or we manage the risk by making smaller trial attempts and building on what works.

That is what a sprint is for, by the way.

It seems to me that one of the best aspects of software is how changeable it is. There are no decisions that have to be set in stone. You can use sprints to see if an idea works, find the details that make or break the idea, and build from that.

Sincerely,

Ryan