Personal Scrum Experience
Recently, I was involved in a number of projects that used Scrum. Just in case you don’t know, Scrum is an agile software development methodology intended to improve communication among team members. When using Scrum, each project has a backlog that contains all the goals and tasks that need to be accomplished. Team members start off with a sprint planning session. During this session, team members pull tasks from the backlog and put them into a so called sprint. Generally, sprints last 2 or 4 weeks and in this time, team members are committed to finish the tasks within the sprint. The most attractive part about Scrum is its daily meeting/stand up feature, in which team members (actually stand up) and answer 3 questions; (1) What was done yesterday? (2) What’s going to be done today? (3) What barriers are faced, if any?
A few days ago, it hit me, ‘Hey, why don’t I modify Scrum a little bit so that it can be applied to my personal life?’ Since then, I started researching previous experiences that used Scrum in different domains. Surprisingly, I found many altered uses of Scrum, which encouraged me to pursue my idea. For example, Michael Hicks and Jeffrey S. Foster, two computer science professors in University of Maryland, adapted Scrum to manage their research groups, rather than traditional software development; their modified version is called SCRAM.
This past Monday, I started jotting down my backlog, which will definitely continue to be modified and improved over time. I also decided to conform to the following scheme for my personalized SCRUM:
- Each sprint should be completed within 1 week.
- Sprint planning should occur every Sunday evening.
- My daily stand up (comedy session??) should be conducted every night before I go to bed.
I have been applying this personalized Scrum for a few days now, and it’s been going pretty well, thus far. I’ll post an update in a few months describing my critiques and thoughts.
Please share your thoughts!!!
[...] few months ago, I started to think about using Scrum in personal life. Today, I’d like to share with you the feedback from my [...]