Hey, are your projects going the way you want? Have you heard the words “Agile” and “Scrum” and wondered what they mean and whether this project management style can help you and your teams?
🚀 I’m going to do that thing where we say “Explain it like I’m 5 years old.”
🎈 Imagine your mom wants you to clean your room. You could just move everything on the floor to under your bed. But your mom might not be too happy about that. ☹️
Instead, if we were using Agile and Scrum to manage this room cleaning project, you’d start by cleaning your room for a few minutes. Then you’d ask Mom to come back and take a look at what you’ve done. If you started out by putting stuff under your bed 🛏️, Mom now has a chance to say “No, honey, under your bed isn’t what I wanted. Try putting the toys in your toy box instead.”
You work a few more minutes and ask Mom to come in again. This time, she says “Yes, honey, that’s great that you put your toys into the toy box, but you’ve put some of your dirty clothes in there, too👖. Clothes should go in the hamper in the hallway.”
😄 By doing these short cycles of work and review, our 5-year-old can only go a short way down the path of doing the wrong thing. And Mom has the opportunity to provide quick feedback before a lot of time has been spent going in the wrong direction.
How about you? Do you have the experience of getting started on a project and after you’ve done a bunch of work, your stakeholders say “That’s not what I wanted?” Agile and Scrum help us to move in the right direction, building what our stakeholders want … and need to solve their problems.
I’m @agilelisa, please reach out to me if you’d like to chat further.