Feral Sunar // Allianz Türkiye - Agile Coach
Earlier, we mentioned that we can be “Agile” at home by breaking daily tasks into small, understandable and meaningful parts with good planning. After the article "Being agile in daily life", I am here with a new topic: Rituals, which are indispensable for HEY!, can also be a part of your private life.
I’ve heard you say "Come on; there is no way I’m going to do a 'retrospective' at home".
But as I tell you, you will see that agility can be integrated into daily hustle and bustle.
Let me briefly talk about a week and show you how I did it.
Those familiar with agile work know: Agile teams of 3-9 people run “sprints,” and the sprints vary between 2-4 weeks.
Of course, it is necessary to set up a different time period for sprints at home. I run a 2-day sprint on the weekend and a 5-day sprint on weekdays at home.
The team is crowded in the weekend sprint because both of our children, one of them a baby and one of them in primary school, are “team members”. The sprint, which starts on Friday evening, ends on Sunday evening as soon as the children go to bed.
We do the planning together on Friday night. The most difficult part is writing the "user stories" that consists of my son’s school and home responsibilities. We write the homework given from the whole school on the "kanban board" so that there is no slacking later. As the homework is finished, the boy crosses it out. It is worth a try just for the motivation of crossing out the written homework on the whiteboard and finishing it in a hurry.
Since the sprint is 2 days, the first day is "planning" and the planning day will not be "daily", the sprint ends with a single daily on Sunday. In that daily, we hear from my son that no homework due on Saturday is completed. If you ask what a daily is, it's a 15-minute standing meeting where we go through work. Since our daily coincides with a Sunday, he can't stand up much. Unfortunately, we usually talk at the breakfast table.
On the last day of the sprint, where we usually go over the completed tasks, and even in the last minute of the "review" meeting, we give a big round of applause for every assignment my son completes so that the next sprint will have more “done” stories.
The final ritual to finish the sprint takes place at a retrospective on a Sunday night while reading to the boy for sleep. Favorite retrospective question: “What did you love doing this weekend?”.
Frankly, I don't want to ask the question "What did you not like to do?" because I guessed the answer.
We talk about why homework is left to the last minute and sometimes not finished, why the room couldn't be tidied, why only 1 book is read when 3 were promised, and with the advantage of being a parent, we end the retrospective by determining some critical actions such as screen time will not be turned on until 3 books are read.
Considering the actions we determined in the retrospective, I think the only issue that we can't get close to the agile working method is the "hierarchy" issue. As parents, we seem to remain hierarchical. Once we deal with this, we will be no different from “agile teams”.
Weekend is ok, but what about weekdays?
The weekday sprint is longer: it is being run from Sunday night to Friday night. A small team of 2 people. The most critical issue in weekday sprints is that the children sleep during the rituals. Otherwise, we will not finish planning, review, or remember what we talked about in retrospective. There is no need for grooming as the weekdays are brisk. It is not very possible to think about the next sprint for pandemic parents.
The daily of this sprint is night. At night, the questions we answer change slightly: What did I do today? What will I do tomorrow? Do I have an obstacle ahead of me?
As soon as the daily is finished, we write the missing materials in the kitchen to the neighborhood market; if we run out of clothes, we run a quick wash/dry operation; we open the calendar and write down the tasks that we share with my husband and that we have to finish the next day on small note papers; We paste it on the “kanban board” hanging on the wall behind our desk at home. By the way, it's a great feeling to tear up the papers as the work is done throughout the sprint.
In our review meeting on the last day of the sprint, we go over the tasks we have completed and congratulate each other for completing that week. We have no energy left for retrospective.
The Essence of the Story: People who are open to change and not afraid to try innovations will definitely find a useful part in HEY! that they experience in their business life that they can adapt to their daily lives. Sometimes it's a retrospective session with her child to evaluate how the weekend went, sometimes it's a planning and prioritization meeting with her husband...
P.S. You can contact us by clicking here to share your experiences and ask questions about the agile working method.
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