Scrum Blog #5: Scrum @ home

[sakib60]

But yes: everyone uses the term Scrum board, while it is actually a Kanban board. When I first heard about a Scrum board (or Scrum poster) for home, I thought: 'well, but what for?'. Until my wife enthusiastically told me that she had read about it on Facebook and then I, as an Agile fan, could not stay behind. In the meantime, we have hung three Scrum posters at home for about nine months.

A Kanban board is all about visualizing tasks. In the Scrum process, it has chinese overseas america data become unthinkable in recent years not to work with such a board. And rightly so: it provides excellent insight into what you still have to do and what you have already done. It also gives a good feeling when you can move a card from 'to do' to 'done': the confirmation that you have completed something. The power of the check mark!

Then the bridge to the home situation. Many parents will recognize the situation: in the evening after dinner the rush hour of brushing teeth, showering, getting dressed, reading and sleeping begins. My wife and I want to teach our children to act independently, but during the rush hour before going to bed that often didn't work: the children distract each other, start singing, play for a while, or take (too) long in the shower. The result was that we often felt like police officers sitting between the children to make sure that all three of them were in bed on time.

“It turned out that they could not properly oversee what they all had to do”
At first we thought they were stalling for time so they could go to bed later. Wrong! It turned out they didn't have a good overview of everything they had to do. We literally 'timeboxed' the rush hour to an hour and within that hour they each have to do their 'tasks'. If they succeed, we read to them. If they don't quite succeed, we read to them for a shorter period. If they don't quite succeed, then tough luck: no reading. Incidentally, the tasks can easily be done within the hour, because we don't want stressed children.

Each child now has their own Scrum poster and their own set of laminated task cards, which we attach to the poster with velcro. The Scrum poster is divided into two: 'To do' and 'Done'. The tasks differ per child. For example, they all have 'Brush teeth', 'Close curtains' and '5 minutes tidying up'. The youngest two both have 'Play piano', because they are taking piano lessons and the oldest has 'Typing', because she is taking a typing course. Our children are old enough to use written cards. For younger children you could use pictograms.