A manifesto for Scrum adoption in your life.
Assuming you already heard about Agile, Scrum, Sprints and Retrospectives.
As in any scrum team, the iterative and incremental process culminate in a retrospective, where members receive and elaborate feedback, taking actions to inspect and correct behaviours, remove obstacles, fix issues.
If we are in an Agile team, retrospective after retrospective we would have the chance to learn and grow, improve as persons, as team members, as a team and as organisation.
Rather than applying the Agile framework to release a product or service starting from an MVP (minimum viable product) imagine we would like to apply it to people starting from an MVP – meaning minimum viable person. It may not make sense to you at the beginning, but consider this MVP as any person that is at a certain point of their lives.
Sprint after sprint we are ready to release “in production” a new better version of ourselves.
We aim to be able to offer to our peers, families, stakeholders, customers, and also to ourselves an updated version of our character, skills, experience, ideas, persona, presence. Sprint after sprint.
You may think also about a versioning strategy or policy as your age being the major version and the month a minor version. So for example, if you are 30 years old in March you would be the 30.3 version of yourself and assuming for simplicity a 4 weeks sprint in April you would go live putting out there the version 30.4 of yourself.
Any new version of yourself may have fixed or mitigate some of the old defects and bad habits you are working on, and may introduce new bugs and biases as well as bringing live new feature, resolutions, commitments, roadmap.
Looking forward, you may want to keep your backlog ordered prioritising your user stories according to what is important to you in the few next sprints. The “definition of done” could include your achievement or your SMART tasks, or your own criteria.
As you grow you will use your experience to understand your own pace or sprint velocity and you’ll get more aware of what are you able to achieve in a month, how to implement new habits -one a time, how to exercise good habits to avoid technical debt and keep your culture tidy and clean.
With each upgraded version, you will get feedback from real users and stakeholders, useful to correct and improve the next version of you balancing them with your life strategy and goals. Each new version is not necessary perfect or good or better. It will be a new hypothesis to validate and it may not work at all, or work for a while and then become deprecated, obsolete, unnecessary.
Sometimes you may need to rollback, downgrade or downsize, some ideas may require spikes, stress testing, UX validations, some others features may be better to be listed for end of support.
Whatever will happen embrace the change, keep improving, practice the Scrum values: commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect.
PS: About versioning…
I oversimplified above numbers not to loose focus on the main concept.
It’s up to you to decide if with your birthday you just made a minor upgrade following the month of the year or a rounded 31.0 that will keep increasing until your next birthday. You may also decide to have a 1 week sprint with 52 minor releases per year. Or whatever you’d like. Let me know if you have any ideas about it.