Finding Love with Scrum
People have a very real drive to seek love and relationships. Even if each person has a different kind of ideal relationship, almost everyone seeks a loving, long-term relationship. But the truth is that although dating can be fun and adventurous, finding a lasting, loving, healthy relationship can be difficult.
Relationships have evolved. In modern relationships, people are seeking honest connections. Committed relationships are no longer about being married because of societal expectations or ensuring that you don’t grow old alone. People seek fulfilling, satisfying relationships based on communication and compatibility.
Although technology has played a huge role in opening dialogue in dating and providing new ways to find potential matches, it hasn’t eliminated all the challenges. Despite these technological advances and conveniences, dating can be an uncomfortable subject to discuss or even to think about.
We want to show you how scrum can make dealing with dating challenges more comfortable and provide a framework for taking steps that you may have never thought possible in your pursuit of happiness. Here are a few of these dating challenges:
- Time: Life is about how you spend the finite amount of time you have each day. Singles have careers, ongoing education, side jobs, personal goals, hobbies, friends, and other nondating activities. It’s easy for a single person to stay late at work or take on that extra side job or project. Although many people want a relationship, they haven’t structured their lives to have time for one. Making room for dating is about priorities.
- Communication: In modern dating, communication has devolved to emailing or texting most of the time. The technological advances that facilitate making connections can also hinder relationships because they replace the face-to-face interactions that are so crucial for minimizing misunderstandings and resolving conflict. No wonder email and texting make it hard to get to know someone on a deep level or easy to get into a fight.
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Meeting: Finding the right person is difficult and feels like luck half the time, but it can be broken into something simple. Most relationships that don’t work out fail for one or two simple reasons: attraction and chemistry, or personality and values.
It’s a problem to find someone you have genuine chemistry with and whose personality and values fit in with how you view life. These two categories oversimplify a variety of factors that affect compatibility, such as finances, selfishness, and intimacy. All these factors contribute to relationship success.
You might look at those problems and think that they have no correlation with scrum because dating is complicated! But that’s exactly why scrum works for finding love. Scrum is about simplifying and working toward a vision. Here are some ways you can apply the scrum framework to romantic relationships:
- Responding to change (such as acceptance, rejection, love, heartbreak, connection, and embarrassment)
- Failing early and fast (wasting as little time as possible on someone who isn’t compatible)
- Inspecting and adapting (becoming the right match for someone else and refining the right match for yourself)
Almost everyone has been through heartbreak (except for the lucky few who meet the love of their life the first time around). For some people, heartbreak leads to bitterness or introversion to protect against further heartbreak. Every layer of attempted protection, however, only prevents you from getting closer to the goal of love. Love is an offensive game, not a defensive one. To be clear, inspecting and adapting based on frequent empirical evidence are your keys to finding happiness.
The following sections look at how you can overcome complications of modern dating and focus on finding love with scrum.
Setting a vision
The roadmap to value (or in this case, the roadmap to love) begins with setting a vision (see Chapter 2). As in business, you need a vision to guide you to your goal.
This area has changed dramatically in the past few years. The only purpose of any kind of romantic relationship used to be getting married and having children. Even though this vision is ideal for some people, it isn’t for others. Define what you’re pursuing when you pursue a relationship. Someone who defines all his interactions by the vision “I just want to have fun with someone I’m attracted to” is going to approach dating in a radically different way from someone who has the vision “I want to get married to someone I consider my best friend and soulmate.”
Keep in mind that visions may change as your circumstances and stages in life change. You may desire to get married, but the thought may be so frightening that you set out to date with the vision of having fun. In that situation, you’re not likely to find marriage any time soon. You may have a lot of fun, but fun won’t necessarily lead to a long-term commitment or marriage until you adjust your vision.
Vision statements are forward-looking internal statements. They describe how you see yourself in the future.
Having fun isn’t a bad goal, but it’s a bad vision if you want something else as an end state. Visions aren’t met instantaneously, and simply having the goal of wanting a life partner doesn’t mean that the next person you go on a date with will be that person. But knowing what you’re pursuing in the long run will change your interactions during dating.
Dating in layers
Relationships evolve. You should know and clearly define what each stage of a relationship means to you. If you have a vision of finding a life partner, you’ll take a series of steps toward that goal. In scrum, these steps are your roadmap, and each major milestone is a release goal. Here are some examples of release goals on a roadmap working toward a vision of finding a life partner:
- Get ready for the dating world (update your wardrobe, start a fitness routine, change your hairstyle, or buy wineglasses, for example).
- Create a short list of must-haves versus want-to-haves in your ideal partner.
- Start dating compatible people.
- Get into a relationship (as defined by you).
- Become committed long-term (dating exclusivity, polyamorous agreement, engagement, or personal equivalent).
- Intertwine lives (cohabitate, make joint major purchases, marry, and/or have children).
Each release goal requires you to engage in tasks and activities that move you from stage to stage. The first release goal alone can take some time.
If you can define what each stage of dating looks like, you can determine what release goal you’re working toward. Use a definition of done. For example, a definition of done for readiness for dating might be accepting invitations to (and bravely showing up at) parties where you can meet new people, along with opening profiles on reputable dating networks. Each layer of a relationship should have a clear definition of done as set by you.
A definition of done for using online dating profiles that requires you to arrange and go on at least one in-person date (ideally more than one) would be a reasonable definition of done if the goal is to move forward and find someone for an in-person relationship.
A definition of done allows for clear communication and boundary setting in your dating life. The transition from dating to relationship is complicated, but you can eliminate some of the confusion by clarifying for yourself the difference between dating and a relationship. When you’ve dated someone to the point where the connection has evolved and has all the characteristics of your definition of done for a relationship, it’s time to validate that you’re in one. But the best part of using scrum to date is that you don’t end up in a relationship by accident; you’re an active participant moving steadily toward your goal.
Not everyone in the dating world has the same definition of done for each stage of a relationship. Open communication and connection must be used to build trust. As you move through each release goal, you have to be open with those you date about what you’re currently seeking and how you define each stage of a relationship.
Discovering companionship and scrum
With your roadmap spelled out, you have the framework for your backlog of requirements: the activities that you’ll plan and take part in to accomplish your release goals and vision, starting with your initial release goal.
Part of your product backlog in preparing yourself for the dating world may be exploring activities and hobbies that you enjoy. A lot of value exists in spending this time building community and finding companionship while doing the things you enjoy. During this phase, most of the discovery is about you. What kinds of people you connect with, the community of people you build around you, and the community you find while you’re doing the things that you enjoy build relationships that may connect you to people to date in the future. You also get a chance to safely connect with potential dating partners without the pressure of a dating setup.
Use existing companionship and friendships to identify and refine your product backlog of what you are looking for when you move forward into dating and relationships.
Often, just putting yourself out there socially leads to dating. Dating happens naturally when you meet and spend time with people with whom you share interests. Relationships work in phases. A difference exists between friendships in communities and dating one on one, although the former can lead to the latter.
Don’t forget to communicate. If you begin a relationship by spending time with someone as a friend, when the relationship evolves, you may forget to communicate about the shift in the relationship. To strengthen your ability to have good timing in potentially awkward situations, use your own definition of done to identify the difference between spending time with someone as a friend and recognizing when you’ve moved on to dating or even a committed relationship. Planning to have that discussion may be an example of a dating backlog item.
Be cautious about spending time with someone with all the intimacy and connection of a committed relationship — but identifying it as a casual friendship. If you struggle with this line of communication, use it as a learning opportunity to inspect and adapt and to move from the release goal of getting ready to date to dating to relationship. Poor communication is damaging to both parties and a prescription for the kind of dating drama that most people try to avoid. Use empirical evidence to refine what kind of relationship you’re looking for, and use dating retrospectives such as the following to ensure that you’re moving toward your goal:
- What is going well?
- What do we want to change?
- How can we tangibly implement that change?
Dating with scrum
The benefits of scrum include a structured approach to a goal, empirical evidence, the inspect-and-adapt factor, and saving time. Life is full, but if you can accept that you want a partner in life, you must accept that you must make room for that person. Most people have heard (or used) the excuse that they’d love to find a relationship but have no time for it.
The good news is that your life is in your control. In the early stages of dating, you must make time for dates. In the later stages of dating, you must make room for a relationship to grow. Relationships don’t happen in petri dishes. You won’t find a quick way to go from having no room for a relationship to being in love and having a wonderful work-life-love balance.
Consider your life to be a product backlog. If your priority for your love-related roadmap and backlog items is always at the bottom, you’ll always push it aside in favor of something else. If you decide that love is a high priority, you’ll create space for it.
Continuing on the roadmap to value and using scrum in dating includes short sprint cycles, inspection and adaptation, and improvement for future sprints.
In scrum, each date is a sprint, so you’re operating on a short sprint cycle meant to move you toward your release goal. Because you may not have a date every day of the week, this schedule gives you ample time between sprints to reflect (inspect) and to plan changes and improvements for the next one (adapt). The time between sprints (dates) is your opportunity for backlog refinement and process improvement.
The inspection part of inspection and adaptation focuses on how you see yourself and your date together. You can examine the following things:
- Does this person have the qualities I’m looking for?
- Do I have fun with this person?
- Does this person meet my must-haves?
- How do I act when I’m around this person?
- What are my thoughts and feelings about this person when we’re not together?
The adaptation portion is up to you. You may adapt what you’re looking for (such as your vision), or you may adapt whom you’re dating (such as by not going on another sprint with the same person). You may need to adapt your interaction and try another sprint with the same person based on your review. If you want to try something more fun, try a date with more lighthearted activities or something you enjoy seeing how those adaptations affect how you feel about the other person.
The best part about using scrum for dating is the inspect-and-adapt process. You and your dating partner get to form your own version of us — or not. As in business, the ability to cut something short based on early empirical evidence that it doesn’t fit your vision saves not only time and money, but also disappointment on both sides.
Winning as a team
Unfortunately, modern dating is full of examples of game-playing, which typically pits people against one another. This mentality in dating overcomplicates interactions and closes communication. In scrum, you plan as a team, execute as a team, and are accountable based on the success or failure of the team. So, even if you feel that you’re on a team of one when it comes to dating, remember that you’re on a team of two. The best thing you can do for yourself is embrace scrum’s concept of being a team with your date and working for the team to succeed rather than engaging in a contest against your date. With scrum, you can rise above the nonsense and avoid the games.
Honest communication is needed for any team and especially for any successful relationship. A common pitfall in contemporary dating is testing dates through loaded questions or actions. Scrum simplifies communication. Using scrum in dating means asking genuine questions and viewing the other person’s answers as a chance to get to know him or her for the purpose of that sprint. In open communication, open dialogue by sharing your own views and asking your date his thoughts. As you plan your date sprints, plan questions that are genuine and encourage honest answers to help you determine whether this person is the right fit.
To work as a team, avoid putting your date in a situation in which you expect a specific behavior, but the person has no way of knowing what the goal is. Dates will often try to answer or behave the way that they believe they are expected to, many times missing the mark.
Here are some examples of behavior tests that generate skewed data:
- You suggest a dating activity that you consider to be extreme (or uncomfortable) just to see how your date reacts, and you make a judgment based solely on that reaction.
- A woman who believes that a gentleman should pay for a date offers to split the check, but if he accepts her offer, she’s no longer interested.
- A man who believes that physical intimacy should wait until a specific time in a relationship (a timeline defined by him but unshared) pursues being physically intimate. If the woman accepts physical intimacy, the man is no longer interested.
These examples use some gender norms, but various types of tests exist. Ask open-ended questions and share your own thoughts.
Focusing versus multitasking
Scrum is a focusing tool. One reason why scrum is so successful is that it edits out the noise of trying to do everything all at once by breaking up challenges into smaller and shorter goals. Instead of doing all projects poorly, scrum helps you focus on doing one project at a time with a higher level of quality than you’d achieve by thrashing around.
The following quote summarizes a recent study from Stanford: “Multitasking in meetings and other social settings indicates low self- and social-awareness, two emotional intelligence (EQ) skills that are critical to success at work.” (Italics emphasis added.)
The study was examining how multitasking lowered effectiveness in a work setting — but emotional intelligence is a life skill. It will be hard to find love if you diminish your self- and social-awareness skills.
When you date two or more people at the same time, your mind and emotions are more distracted by multitasking than focused on discovering whether someone is a good match. Multitasking in dating may also mean trying to rush through multiple phases of a relationship.
Modern dating teaches everyone to date as many people as possible for as long as possible to keep all options open. The attempt to mitigate the risk that one relationship won’t work out almost guarantees the risk that numerous or all relationships won’t work out.
Dating multiple people can be a good thing to increase your chances of finding what you’re looking for in the early stages, however. If your vision is finding the person you want to settle down with, having many relationships at the same time won’t be a good fit for that vision (but it may be a good fit for a “having fun” vision).
Limit your pool of potential dates by using work-in-progress limits (see Chapters 5 and 6).
The roadmap to value takes you through the date (that is, the sprint) to the finish line (sprint review and retrospective). As you finish each date, take time to inspect the date itself (that is, your sprint review). Ask whether you liked the person and whether you liked yourself with that person. Then move to a retrospective for possible process changes, such as the way you went about planning the date, the questions you asked during the date, and the tactics or tools you used to evaluate whether your date was a good match. Your definition of done should be specific and clear enough to make it easy to inspect whether your sprints were successful and adapt your backlog for the next sprint.
When a potential relationship ends or doesn’t move forward to the next release, another product backlog item (potential mate) can take its place. As in business, pivoting isn’t bad as long as you pivot early to minimize investment (in terms of time and emotional drag as well as money) and as long as doing so moves you closer to your vision.
Planning your wedding with scrum
If you’ve already found love and are in the middle of an engagement, congratulations! Weddings are some of the biggest celebrations of life, meant to weave together families and friends and to acknowledge the beginning of a lifetime as a couple. Wedding days are full of many positive experiences, but the time leading up to the big day can put a strain on the couple that’s trying to plan.
Use scrum for what it’s built for: executing an important project. A wedding is the ultimate project. In wedding planning, you have a set date and (ideally) a set budget. Setting priorities and making decisions accordingly are necessary for having the kind of wedding you want. Planning a wedding successfully with scrum involves the following components:
- Setting a vision. Talk about the ideal must-haves as part of your wedding and the experience you want to take away.
- Setting a schedule (wedding day) and budgetary constraints.
- Establishing and prioritizing wedding requirements (such as the venue, invitations, and cake) into a roadmap.
- Establishing release goals (such as venue acquired, officiator scheduled, friends and family notified, decorations and place settings lined up, and photo shoots established).
- Organizing your first sprint to address the highest-priority backlog items, breaking them into tasks, and swarming those tasks to completion).
- Executing sprints and reprioritizing any new requirements discovered in each sprint.
- Using sprint review to inspect and adapt (not only priorities, but also product backlog items such as remaining budget) and making new decisions moving forward.
When examining a wedding backlog, you may immediately see what needs prioritization. Some locations allow outside caterers, for example, whereas others require you to use a specific one. Also, locations frequently have strict time rules. Given that location can affect other backlog items, consider it to be a high-risk item (if not the highest-risk item) to address in an early sprint. After that item is set, it may change your existing backlog. You may make decisions toward big-budget items that you have prioritized early on to know what the remaining budget is for other items.
Toward the end of wedding planning, most couples still have long lists of small items to do. Try using a task or Kanban board to move small items forward and visualize what still needs to be addressed.
Weddings are expensive. As we discuss in terms of release planning (Chapter 5), portfolio management (Chapter 13), and financing projects (Chapter 14), using incremental funding and doing the highest-priority requirements first ensure that you finance the most critical features even if the money runs out before you complete the entire backlog. If the venue and food are already taken care of, it may not be a big deal if a few party favors have to be left off the list.
Families and Scrum
Busy is the defining word of families everywhere. With multiple levels of work and school commitments, it’s difficult to find time to genuinely connect as a family. If you don’t relax by connecting with your family, your stress levels remain high, lowering your effectiveness in many areas of life, including work. Connection and recreation with the family are vital parts of mental and emotional well-being.
Families can get caught up in a cycle of short-term communication via texting and long “to-do” lists. Each family member tends to work on his or her own list. Family members miss out on maximizing the amount of support they could be giving one another because of lack of communication and coordination.
The challenges facing families are as diverse as families themselves, but the following issues can apply to most families and can be addressed with scrum:
- Conflicting family priorities: One member of the family wants a vacation; another wants to buy a car or go to college; yet another wants a home renovation. As in business, not all goals can be met at the same time. As in successful businesses, planning and coordinated decision-making are vital for achieving a goal.
- Communication: Short text messages. Conversation cut short by a call from work. Faces buried in mobile devices sharing photos on social media during. Communication is more vital to families than even to work relationships, but exhaustion and busyness deplete real conversation.
- Conflicting schedules: It’s become a luxury for family members to be in the same place at the same time. Scrum can help you track who is involved in what activity and create a schedule to connect.
- Personal responsibility and accountability: Every family copes with the pressures of daily life, such as chores, cleaning, errands, and paying bills. Often, one parent feels unsupported or overburdened, or one child feels too much or too little responsibility. For single parents, this problem is compounded. Scrum can help you balance responsibilities across family members.
With the challenges of modern life tugging at the bonds among family members, it’s important to find innovative ways to stay connected and grounded. Stability and healthy relationships within the family affect what you do outside it, from school to career to friendships.
In the following sections, we show you concrete examples of scrum being implemented into daily life by simplifying communication, using a family vision statement, prioritizing a family backlog, making decisions as a team, and increasing responsibility through visibility and ownership.
Setting family strategy and project visions
The biggest challenge in making family decisions is conflicting priorities. In ancient times, families frequently had mottos or sayings that defined their character, and we suggest that it’s time to bring this tradition back with a modern twist. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to address conflicts inside and outside the home by recognizing that the behavior doesn’t fit the family strategy?
A clearly defined family strategy or mission can provide behavior, values, and structure to guide a family in all its decisions. Family strategies work especially well when all family members have ownership of the strategy statement rather than having it dictated by a parent.
As we say in Chapter 2, the vision is where the roadmap to value begins. A vision statement for a project must support the overall strategy or mission, or a disconnect occurs between project direction and overall business strategy. The situation is no different for families. As families plan projects, they start with a vision of the result of the project, and that vision ties directly into the family’s strategy.
Planning and setting priorities
Most families take life a day at a time or even an hour at a time. But realizing goals takes planning and priority management. Scrum provides a framework for progressing toward goals.
As a family defines its strategy and decides on projects and activities that carry out the strategy, the projects and activities become clearer and easier to prioritize and plan. Scrum’s iterative approach to planning, executing, inspecting, and adapting leads families to success.
Project planning
Families establish a strategy (if they haven’t already done so) and then define the vision (see Chapter 2) for the project goal. Each family member gets to brainstorm the ideas to achieve the project vision, which becomes the roadmap for that family project. The family estimates the effort and complexity of each idea and prioritizes and orders the ideas based on their effort, complexity, value to the project, and risks involved. The roadmap is owned by the family team.
Chapter 4 describes methods for creating estimates. Family estimations may not need to use the Fibonacci sequence. Estimating is simply a way for the family to get an idea of the relative effort to complete things so that they can plan accordingly. Using affinity estimating with the more familiar concept of T-shirt sizes may be all you need.
Release planning
Families can identify minimum viable product (MVP) releases (see Chapter 5) leading up to completing a project and plan each in detail one at a time as each one is completed. When you’re planning a birthday party, for example, the first release may be selecting and reserving a location. When you don’t know the location, you don’t know all the details of what you’ll be able to do for the birthday party. When you know the location, you can send out invitations, choose a caterer, and select decorations.
Always use a definition of done when tackling each sprint and release. If a family-product backlog item is so vague that no one knows how it can be considered to be done, it shouldn’t be considered to be ready to execute in a sprint. Vague or open-ended backlog items that make it into a sprint tend to sit in the Doing column for a long time. If your family backlog has items such as the following, you know that you need to break them down and quantify how they can be done:
- Clean the house. (This item could take days, depending on the type of cleaning and the portions of the house that need cleaning.)
- Save money for a trip to Yellowstone. (This item says nothing about how much money is needed or what means will be used to earn or save the money.)
Sprint planning
When you know the long-term goal (vision), how to get there (roadmap of how to get there), and the big steps needed to get there (releases), breaking the work into sprints is easy. Weeklong sprints are a natural cadence for families as well as businesses. For most people, work and school schedules are predictable; one day of the week usually serves as a start or end point with a logical place to reset, plan, and review. Even if you don’t have a consistent break in routine, the family can establish one.
Sprint planning for a family doesn’t need to take long. With a task board, a family can quickly identify the items from the backlog that can be accomplished during the week. Each family member can identify how to help with each backlog item. Members move the items from the backlog to the To Do column and talk about the tasks required for each item in the sprint backlog. Then they identify when in the week they’ll be able to accomplish those tasks. (See Chapter 5 for more on sprint planning.)
Then you’ll have hugs, kisses, and high-fives all around as family members agree on the plan and go to work throughout the week. Later in this chapter, we describe how to implement this type of planning into existing or natural family interactions.
Visibility and transparency are every bit as important for families as for businesses. Create a family task board just as you would in a business. A tangible task board is best. Children love the satisfaction of moving a sticker, magnet, sticky note, or index card from one column to another as much as adults do. Families can use virtual task boards as well. Find what makes most sense for your family, but make sure that your board is easily accessible and visible, because family members will refer to and update it every day.
Daily scrums
Giving family members an opportunity each morning or evening to say what they did, what they’ll be working on next, and what help they’ll need from other family members to accomplish those tasks can happen quickly and greatly improve the chances of success for that day.
Use swarming techniques to move sprint backlog items to the Done column. A good way for older children to learn leadership and service is to allow a younger sibling to shadow them to learn a new skill. A good way to increase unity and teach cooperation and collaboration is to encourage family members to work together on backlog items.
Scrum teams are cross-functional. Embrace the concept of shadowing and pair programming in your home by having family members teach new skills when appropriate so that responsibilities can be shared. If one person is responsible for all the cooking, cook together. For the cooking project, one of the children may be able to take on the product-owner role by prioritizing and ordering the tasks for the other family members to carry out, and then practicing her decision-making skills by accepting or rejecting the work along the way. Parents can guide children throughout the process.
These projects are not only opportunities to bond, but also opportunities to pass along vital life skills that enable each member of the family to take on certain tasks.
Thrashing occurs to families as well as businesses. Families are like large organizations in that they frequently have many projects going at the same time. (Read Chapter 14 for information about the effects of trying to do too much at once and a discussion on the hierarchy of thrashing.) Planning a family vacation, a family reunion, and a home renovation project while preparing a child to leave for college are too many projects for a family to plan at the same time. As in business, family leaders must decide which projects are highest-priority to ensure their success. You may have pressure to do all projects at the same time, but you don’t have to. As a family uses scrum’s planning structure to determine what projects to take on, they assess the effort and complexity of each project. Then they can determine what bandwidth they have to prioritize and order, and the big-picture view enables them to make better-informed decisions.
Thrashing on multiple projects means that completing these projects takes at least 30 percent more time. Working on one project at a time is faster than multitasking. See Chapter 13 for details.
Communicating with scrum
Scrum provides ways to increase critical communications, even when time is short. Scrum uses a variety of tools for communications, one of which is prioritizing face-to-face communication whenever possible. On a scrum team, major decisions are never enacted via text or email. This one simple change can dramatically revitalize the dynamics in a family. Parents know that when the tone and body language are present, understanding can dramatically improve!
Put down the mobile devices in your home and talk to other family members face to face. Or make it a house rule that if a conversation is taking place, no participant should be watching television, playing a video game, working on a computer, or using a mobile device. A family’s mantra might be “Look up when we’re talking.”
Face-to-face communication works only if both people are participating in a focused conversation. Reduce miscommunication and length of conversations by quitting the habit of conversational multitasking.
To put face-to-face communication to good use, some existing family activities can provide a natural forum for sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and retrospectives. One such activity is family mealtime.
Author and speaker Bruce Feiler presented a TED talk on “Agile programming — for your family” (www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family/transcript), where he discusses the dramatic change that his family achieved in minutes a day using a daily scrum model.
Think about the value that a daily scrum could add to your family in a simple 15-minute timebox! The following are some examples of benefits your family might reap from taking the time to communicate without distractions:
- Hearing updates from every member of the family about what happened during his or her day
- Sharing plans or goals for each person’s upcoming day
- Listening to current challenges for each member of the family
- Providing an opportunity to problem-solve as a team or support one another through challenges
- Celebrating accomplishments daily
Though family dinnertime is a good time slot for a family meeting, those crucial 15 minutes can happen at any time during the day. A daily scrum over breakfast, over dinner, or even before a certain television show will work as long as the time slot is consistent and limited to 15 minutes. Daily scrums aren’t long enough to resolve all the issues of daily life, but they accomplish the task of opening lines of communication and establishing trust and support. That way, if greater challenges arise, the family support foundation is already in place.
Inspecting and adapting for families
Sprint reviews and retrospectives are as important for families as they are for businesses. For busy families, it may make sense to review accomplishments (sprint review) and then review processes and tools used as well as communication, relationships, and discipline techniques (sprint retrospective) during the same meeting time just before planning a new week (sprint planning).
Sprint reviews may include results from the school week; progress made toward planning the next family vacation; and successes in sports, music, and other activities. Sprint reviews are also times to review events that are scheduled for the future to identify items for the backlog to help prepare for them, like a birthday party or getting the house ready for extended-family guests who will be visiting.
For weekly family meetings, the following questions follow scrum’s sprint retrospective model:
- What worked well this week?
- What didn’t work well?
- What can we agree to work on next week?
You may be surprised by the feedback coming from family members. During the family meeting, everyone should choose two or more improvements that they all agree to work on for the following week. This agreement is called a team agreement in the agile space.
The family may also choose what consequences should occur if rules are broken or if one member of the family doesn’t meet his or her commitments. Again, rather than the traditional model in which consequences follow action, in a scrum model, the team (the family) agrees on lessons learned and how to improve them before taking on the new sprint goal. The team also agrees about the benefits or rewards of meeting new goals. The reward for achieving the family goal is a wonderful motivator.
Making chores fun and easy
It would be wonderful if chores could simply be handled without difficulty instead of escalating into arguments. Many parents are discovering how to empower their children to motivate themselves to do chores by using personal task or Kanban boards.
Human beings have an innate need to feel accomplished. Most adults make to-do lists, but we like the items that are easy to accomplish quickly so that we can cross them off the list. Children crave the same sense of accomplishment. They need to know that their contributions are important. Participating in the household is absolutely essential for helping children know that they’re valued. Choosing age-appropriate ways for children to participate in running the household molds the family together as a unit. Task boards make it easy for everyone to see what it means to be successful.
If kids are struggling with larger chores, treat the larger chore as the user story and help them by breaking down important tasks. If they struggle to accomplish “Clean your bedroom,” have “Clean your bedroom” be the user story, with smaller tasks such as “Organize books,” “Put dirty laundry away,” “Make bed,” “Wash bedroom window,” “Put away toys,” and “Dust bookshelves.” That way, children can have the user story “Clean your bedroom” in the Doing column along with other smaller tasks until all tasks are complete. They can ask for assistance with larger, more difficult tasks until they learn how to accomplish them.
As in business, family task-board requirements (user stories) should be ones that can be accomplished within a sprint, and tasks should be ones that can be completed in a day or less. For younger children, tasks should be an hour or less to set them up for success.
Finding love