Scrum in personal life — Can we ?
By: Anupam Mukhopadhyay
Tags: Thoughts, Personal Development, Agile, Improvement, Scrum

Recently went through the 2 day course for Scrum Master and earned the Certified Scrum Master certification for myself. But that is not the news I look to share here.

Before proceeding further, just a quick status check. What is scrum ? Quoting from https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html

“Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value”

While we learn the nuances of how to apply the framework into product development, it intrigued me to think why can this not be applied to our day to day life. After all we are all trying to improve ourself through a variety of learning and experiences. Let’s try to break it down.

We : The product

Consider us being the product we are trying to create. Let’s think each of our life’s milestones as the incremental updates we would like to add to ourself.

To being with — our educational system is time boxed already! And the judgement criterion is also fixed — passing the exams. While not going into aspect of if the system itself is ideal for eduction, that would be a parallel introspection, what is interesting here, though not meeting the exact definitions of sprints or the framework, we are already into the scrum mode in our day to day life — Trying to achieve pass mark is the regular checkpoints called exams there by improving our offering as a person being judged on the scale of being educated.

Each target we set for ourselves, why can we not treat each milestone with a product development mindset? Can we not be multiple product offering being built into a complete package. After all we are human beings capable of doing many things.

Let’s take one more thread — The yearly appraisals we have — Do we really take the feedback in the real sense ? Does the system really work ? And if we think it does, then is the appraisal not the regular feedback we get at the end each sprint. It is similar, but may be we just need to think differently. We need to think of ourself as the product owner. We need to own our developmentinto a minimal viable product more objectively. And identify the stakeholders in the right sense.

Everyone says the same, but differently.

Every self help article you read, every self improvement article you would read, am sure you would find few common themes.

Let me share few quotes I could note down:

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” ~ Mark Twain

“The key to realising a dream is to focus not on success but on significance — and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

Are we not seeing most pointing to:

Breaking down the tasks; Taking small steps; Little victories; Greater meaning;

Thinking like a product owner

The need I feel is owning our actions. Owning what we do. Owning our future and what we want to achieve. Playing the role of product owner for ourself. Make sure we as “product” called “human being” is rightly abled, aptly knowledgable and build to deliver.

And you know what, we always had a life long scrum master with us, showing us the path, guiding us, teaching us the framework to be followed with regular feedback through their love and scoldings — Our Parents !

Scrum in personal life — Not that difficult I guess !!

Cheers,

Anupam