How to do Home Scrum

This category covers what it says on the tin: the practicalities of how to do Home Scrum. There is also a sub-category of ideas related to Scrum that, personally, we found less useful.

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Diagram of how to do Home Scrum. First section: What you'll need 1) At least one other person (could be online) 2) An empty wall you see often 3) A board, post-it notes, and (for a whiteboard) blu-tack or (for a cork board) pins. Second section: Board layout Adapt this layout to you, or start simple with columns for To Do, Doing, and Done. Divide columns with ribbon, string, tape, or strips of newspaper. Use different colours for different life categories (e.g. Health, Home, Work, Hobbies). Each task should be on a single post-it note of the appropriate colour, with a specific, do-able next step written on it. In the top corner you can write a number in a circle, which gives the task points. Points represent effort, and we often use the following scale: 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, infinity. Suggested landscape board layout: 1) 'Backlog' first column, far left, groups tasks by life category 2) 'This Week' top half of second column; fill this with a realistic number of tasks from the backlog 3) 'Regulars' bottom half of second column; 'Regulars' are repeating tasks, e.g. housework. 4) 'Today' third column, potentially split further into columns for each person's tasks. Could add a 'Morning' heading at the top of the column and an 'Afternoon' one halfway down, to indicate when you'll get to a task. 4) 'Done today' top third fourth column. 5) 'Burn-up Chart' middle third fourth column, this can just be a simple graph to show how many tasks you've done, but can be adapted later into a fun game. 6) 'Done This Week', bottom third fourth column; read the tasks from here again before discarding them, to celebrate your achievements. Third section: The Scrum Events 1) The Daily Scrum: - maximum 15 minutes - stand up if possible - move tasks to 'done today' - count total points done - record points on burn-up chart - move tasks back to regulars or into 'done this week' - plan tasks for next day (move them to 'today') - do *every day* 2) Retrospective ('retro') - 5 to 30 minutes - Discuss improvements to your system - Pick an idea to try for the next week - Use little games to make it more fun - Air your feelings - Weekly or fortnightly 3) Planning - 15 to 45 minutes - Remove stale tasks from backlong - Break down larger tasks into smaller steps - Decide which tasks from the backlog to move into 'this week' - Pick fewer tasks than you think you can do - Weekly or fortnightly 4) Review - Clear out 'done this week' - Remind yourself of all your progress and celebrate

What Scrum is

Scrum is a way of organising a small group of people to work together. The whole system is defined fully in the Scrum Guide, which is only 12 pages long. It involves using a board with columns represe

checklist

Start Home Scrum now using check-lists

How to get the most out of this blog This blog is written with the most possible emphasis on helping you to put the ideas into specific action immediately. In this post, there are check-lists of all t

too long; didn't read

TL;DR: Summary of the whole Home Scrum blog as bullet-points

Too long; didn’t read? No problem. Please find below a bullet-point list summary of Home Scrum of nearly all the ideas included in this blog. Finding your Home Scrum team Scrum is meant to be us

atlas

How to ask for help using Home Scrum (with scripts)

What you are actually asking for It is a good idea, and a sign of respect, to ask for specific help when approaching someone. So, what are you actually asking someone in your Home Scrum team to do? He

birds on a line

Who to choose for your Home Scrum team

How to choose your team You need at least one other person to do Home Scrum. You can have more than one—the official Scrum Guide states that a Scrum team should be small, “typically 10 or fewe

Stuff to get for doing Home Scrum

Gathering your equipment You don’t need much to do Home Scrum, and you likely could improvise solutions from what you already have. But you may want a bit more in the way of equipment, and if so, th

How to find a good space for your Home Scrum board

The very first decision to make when getting your Home Scrum system set up is where you should put your board. It needs to be somewhere where you will see it frequently. If it is tucked away in a

Photo of an 8 foot by 4 foot board. On the left half, the columns are 'Backlog', 'Today', 'Done' and 'Regulars'. The rows across these are 'Sally', 'Francis' and 'Both.' In the right half there is a large calendar of the next fifteen weeks. In the bottom right corner there are 'Done Dones'.

Some Home Scrum board layouts, from simple to overly complex

At the heart of the Scrum framework is the Scrum board. It’s best to use a real, physical board, although it doesn’t matter whether it’s a cork-board or white-board, or even just a demarcated pi

burn up chart diagram

Burn-up charts & story points: the weird world of intrinsic motivation

Capturing a task for your Scrum board is as simple as grabbing a small scrap of paper, jotting the task down, and putting it on the relevant place on your board. This is all that is required by offici

Life categories

I feel that a good planning system would not be complete without some colour-coding. A good level for this is to use different colours of paper for different types of tasks. In corporate Scrum, these

Sprints and Sprint Goals

What is a sprint? As stated in the introductory post, a sprint refers to the time-cycle in Scrum at the end of which you have your Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Planning for the next

How to do the Home Scrum events

What are the Scrum events? In Scrum, we avoid the term ‘meeting’ because even inside the corporate world, it has too many negative connotations. They used to be called ‘ceremonies’ but now the

Different flavours of Daily Scrum

The main purpose of your Daily Scrum is to meet as a whole team in front of your Scrum board and share your progress and obstacles, ideally towards your Sprint Goal. It is time-boxed to fifteen minute

Ideas for your Home Scrum retrospective

The Sprint Retrospective, as the name suggests, is a chance to retrospectively reflect on the last sprint as a team and consider how it went. As the Scrum guide says, it is for the team to “plan way

How to plan (and how to make planning less overwhelming)

The purpose of planning I used to think that the point of planning out my time was to fit more into my days. By cleverly combining certain errands into one trip, squeezing tasks in the spaces between

Ways of using your Home Scrum system on the move

What Kanban is and how we’ve used elements of it in Home Scrum

Kanban’s similar-but-different approach Kanban is a similar system to Scrum that is meant to help visualise your workflow and improve it based on empirical feedback from reality. Instead of using st

Extra ideas for gamifying your Home Scrum system

There are many ways of expanding on the basic Scrum framework, and in this post I have put together a bunch of suggestions for extra things Francis and I have used that have helped us to get more out

Digital Home Scrum board options (if you have to)

As I say in this post, I would definitely encourage you to use a physical Scrum board. However, there are situations where a digital Scrum board will be the only feasible option, especially if not all

Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, and Acceptance Criteria

The following ideas are not all an official part of Scrum, but they are often used in conjunction with it as complementary techniques. Francis and I don’t use them in our Home Scrum, as we struggle