A day with scrum master Papa

The things we do to our children...

Perhaps you have to be a little crazy for this. But I'm sure that for a lot of other scrum enthousiasts out there, this question makes perfect sense: What would it be like to run your family as a Scrum team? Would it work? Would it be fun? How far could you really push it?

There's only one way to find out! With Product Owner Mama off to work and school closed for the day, this was the perfect opportunity for an experiment. The kids happily agreed to be guinea pigs in my little home scrum laboratory. And so it began: a day with scrum master Papa.

What shall we do today?

A very reasonable question to ask. We knew that the goal of the day should be to learn lots of cool stuff and also have fun.

We made a list of all the things we could do, gathering ideas from all the team members. Some of the bigger items were a bit too vague, so we split them up in smaller, more concrete steps. Learning about bats for example, would consist of finding an informative text, a drawing, and a list of facts. Learning about bunnies would be very similar, so we'd do bats and bunnies together. Some other items on our list of things to do: homework, gym class, tidying up our mess (PO Mama had indicated this was high priority). We also knew we had to make soup for lunch and that the youngest team member would need a nap in the afternoon. In order to get the timing right, we made a more detailed plan for the day.

Pumpkin soup with Continuous Integration and Concurrent Engineering

Making soup was going to be a difficult task and would require some specialised skills. Yielding the big kitchen knife is not something you trust to a junior team member! As a good scrum team, we know that good technical practices are indispensable, so we included Continuous Integration and Concurrent Engineering into our workflow.

We could have assigned every individual team member a specific task, giving them clear instructions and a separate work station, in an attempt to isolate and optimise the team members. But we decided to do the opposite. We all sat together at the big table, and would contribute where and when we could be of most value to our delicious and healthy shared goal. This way everyone could learn from what the others were doing. To some this may seem like an uncontrolled mob, but everyone on the inside knows what they are doing, and why!

A key insight was that peeling the entire pumpkin would take a long time, and we wanted all ingredients together as early as possible. After all, we were no strangers to the principles of Continuous Integration. So we sliced off a small piece first, which was easy and fast to process, getting pumpkin pieces into the integration bucket really quickly. This meant we could integrate all the ingredients from the start. That's when we noticed that the pieces of carrot were a lot smaller than the pieces of pumpkin; we could get away with bigger pieces of carrot. However, our carrot-cutter decided he actually enjoyed his work, so he didn't feel the need to optimize it. So much for team work, mate!

Keeping track as the day goes on

With the soup well underway, time for some learning activities. The original plan to learn about bunnies was ditched, cats were chosen instead. We enjoyed our lunch, after which gym class, homework and naps were all executed flawlessly, though sometimes a bit later than originally planned. Fortunately we had kept some empty space in our day plan.

All the while, the team kept close track of progress.

Closing the day

After all the hard work, it was time to show off. When the product owner got home, the team members were very eager to show what they'd done.

Scrum master Papa thought it was important to take a moment to look back over the day, in case we could learn something valuable for the next day. He also hadn't used stickies yet that day, so he organised a litte retrospective.

Final thoughts

So what did we learn from this experiment? Not only is it possible to run your family like a scrum team, it is fun! Some things come quite naturally, and I even think it helped the children take more initiative and get themselves organised. But that might just be me seeing what I want to see. This is undeniable though: we did get done what was most important, even the product owner was impressed. Another thing I learned: getting children to learn for a day takes a lot of energy and creativity. Hats off to teachers that do this every day!

As to the question of how far you can push it, I think the answer must be: pretty darn far. Though I'm sure you could push it even further! Are there any other Scrum enthousiasts out there that have inflicted similar experiments on their loved ones? I'd be very curious to hear your story!

Meanwhile, this scrum master has earned a cup of tea. Poor Mama will have to put up with this smug face for a loooooong time ??