Running Agile At Home

Agile is merely a philosophy of how to change the way we think about delivering value. Powerful ideas have grown from the original philosophy, namely frameworks, like Scrum and Kanban.

For Running Agile at Home What you’ll need (it’s that simple):

• Wall space for a wallboard
• Stickies
• Sharpies/Pens
• Painters tape

What you’ll need to decide:

• How complex you want your wallboard to be
• How to begin introducing the idea to your spouse/kids

Being the Product Owner – I need to create something like this picture for requirement gatherings and planning with my Team (Myself, my Wife and my Daughter) – OUR BACKLOG BOARD:

This is what our BOARD looks like:

Benefits of Running Agile at Home

• The power of running Agile at home are exactly the same of running Agile at a company level
• Overall transparency where work effort is going
• Tracking progress in real-time
• Focus time for work (no interruptions)
• Organisational (family) alignment
• Delivering highest-priority and highest-value first
• Negotiating execution order (I lose willingly most of the time  :-))
• Negotiating value

The Coaching and Sprint Planning

• Describing the Sprint Goal, going through highest priorities, ordering the sprint package (prioritised and value sorted by process orientation [days]).
• Ensuring the team is aligned to the sprint is very important before we commit (to do our best) to deliver!

Sprint Retrospective

There is a lot of great things that come out of managing flow and work with kids using Agile/Scrum:

• Alignment around tasks to do
• Negotiating! – One of the best things that come out of this is teaching (early on) the skills of negotiating, positive engagement patterns and communication patterns in a family. Even at a young age, my daughter negotiated many aspects of the User Stories and tasks associated with them. Even negotiating cleaning the play room a day in advance because she could knock it out sooner than expected! The Product Owner (myself) was VERY pleased!
• Understanding the value of transparency when we work, being honest, clear in communication, and executing to shared expectations and shared understanding

OUR Team

Summary

Running Agile at home isn’t that tough, and you can reap many powerful benefits of using Agile at home. Even in our Scrum classes, we learn principles, techniques, and methods that extend far beyond just “work.”

These are powerful ideas that you can take to any endeavour, whether in extracurricular activities, clubs, home-life, and more.