Background
Like most working parents, it has become increasingly difficult to juggle work, exercise, quality time with family and responsibilities at home. We found ourselves constantly trying to work in conversations about the management of our home while doing other things. I’m a process guy. I need things to be written down or I will forget. I’ve spent the last 12 years building a backlog of work, prioritizing it, and getting it done. Why should my home life be any different? I’m a firm believer of running home like a business when it comes to finances – despite the availability of “automatic” budget monitoring tools like Mint.com, we’ve managed our own budget spreadsheet for the entirety of our marriage and it has worked well. So we set off on a journey to manage simple home projects and tasks with the process I know best…scrum.
Trello Board
I’ve implemented scrum in quite a few frameworks – Visual Studio Team Services, VersionOne, Manuscript, Liquid Planner, and Trello. I’m a big fan of the simplicity of Trello. It serves its core purpose – swimlanes and cards – very well. There are two add-ons (Power-Ups) that I find useful on most projects – Calendar and Card Repeater. I use the Card Repeater to automatically create recurring tasks like putting away laundry, cooking meals, washing the windows (monthly), and doing my taxes (yearly). Cards get dropped automatically onto the Sprint Backlog like manna from heaven – no more trying to remember what needs to be done, just work the list.
We broke our board up into 4 swimlanes: Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, In Process, and Done. The Product Backlog is a wishlist – things that we eventually want to get done. The Sprint Backlog is things that will get done this week. In Process is meant as a temporary holding bucket so two people don’t unknowingly work on the same task (not that two people would choose to do the taxes!). Done is done.
We use a color-coded legend to put cards into buckets and break up longer-running projects, like working on the “poolhouse” (hint: it’s not a poolhouse, perhaps never will be a poolhouse, but it’s fun to refer to it as a poolhouse).
Home Scrum Board
The Process
Our sprints run from Saturday to Friday. Originally they ran from Sunday to Saturday, but we found it odd that the weekend was split. Besides, I wouldn’t do the laundry two days in a row and that bothered me to have a card sitting out there for 5 days just because it didn’t need to be done yet.
We use the following sprint ceremonies (meetings):
- Sprint Planning – 8 PM Friday night: Go over everything that needs to be done during the next week. Have a tentative plan for who will get it done and when. Add any details like links to recipes, due dates for trash day, etc.
- Wine + Sprint Retrospective – 8:30 PM Friday night: You could say this one gets skipped or implemented every week. We rarely discuss what went well and what didn’t go well. After 6 weeks, things are running pretty smooth. But we still enjoy the wine anyway!
- Daily Standup – 8 PM: This one is absolutely key. This is where we used to butt heads. Things change during the week. Schedules are busy. The house is loud and we’re struggling to get quality time with family without having to worry about what’s getting done and what’s not. Having 15 minutes carved out every day affords us worry-free family time the rest of the time.
The Results
We are about as happy as we could be with a scrum process, and honestly didn’t expect it to be “fun”. I mean, work is fun, but that’s just because I thought I was a nerd and worked with nerds. We’ve had a few hiccups along the way, including the sprint start/end dates discussed above. Overall it’s serving the purpose and turning an otherwise stressful process into a manageable, repeatable, and transparent process. We no longer need the wine on Friday nights, but that doesn’t mean it’s going anywhere anytime soon 🙂