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Scrum in your daily life

Last post 10:42 pm March 11, 2016 by Venkatesh Rajamani
9 replies
10:40 am February 28, 2016

Scrum from a normal day

Is Agile a Part of your daily life? Of course it is a part of everyone lives. The Evolutionary approach to Software development have Agile .. That Changes our lives come to light from some of the bitter experience we had in traditional development, It is not Technology that Changed our lives, it is that we changed the way we worked, through Technologies .

Someone asked me how would you explain Ken's and Jeff 's evolutionary approach Scrum to someone who are not in Software development. When you give your clothes to laundry. The person receive who receive your bags will also receive bags from many customers. Once the person chooses the bag to pick he will complete the bag full of clothes once, only then he will move on to the next bag. Should he mix the bags either he will have to do the rework twice the times that he normally takes or he will lose some of his creamy customers .This is how you develop features in Software Development which is Vertically sliced and made useful to the Customer. Don't try to pick more bags at the same time and end of the day when one the Customer comes in you can't say I am done half of ur bag n half of someone else. Track features not activities. Feature is the bag and multiple customers will have different features to be delivered, This shows Scrum is not Just for Software Development it can be applied in our day to day life to see drastic changes, Should you feel the way we work isn't working out change the way we work.


05:12 pm March 3, 2016

I feel you are talking more about Kanban then scrum, especially WIP limits. Otherwise in your example the first thing you should have done is prioritized the bags to complete.


Anonymous
08:29 am March 4, 2016

This is insane but...

Trying to figure out what your significant other wants if he doesn't tell you what's the problem. The guessing game is akin to a Sprint.


04:25 am March 5, 2016

Steven

Choosing the bag is your priority. I am not trying to say WIP limits am saying how not to mix things. Focus is what am trying to say.

Kat- thanks for your feedback. Appreciate it. But could not get completely what is your question


04:26 am March 5, 2016

Moreover, other than software development of you take Scrum in your daily life. We say which order to start ironing clothes indirectly tells u the priority or whcih u shud pick first


Anonymous
05:25 pm March 6, 2016


Kat- thanks for your feedback. Appreciate it. But could not get completely what is your question



Often times at work, people would come to us saying, "I want a website.. this and that." You ask the customer exhaustively what they wanted for a website on top of the technical specifications they want (ex. They want something responsive, they want a forum feature, etc) but the answers are vague and broad like, "I want it to be inviting but at the same time professional but chic." You try to squeeze in more from them but couldn't get pass the vague and broad descriptions.

You set a Sprint (normally it's less than a month for us) and you lay down what the customer wants for his website and what you all perceive from it. The web dev does their wire framing and start coding. Come Sprint review, you show the client a very astonishing websites, perhaps the best you've come up with as a team. You walk them through but later on he says, "I don't like xxxx, change it." You ask him what he wants and it's the same vagie and broad description.

So here you are creating a new backlog and starting a new sprint.

I likened it to relationships wherein you try to identify what your significant other wants and after exhaustive efforts of trying to change for and to please your partner, it's always adding more things to the backlog. But of course, new sprints will always be exciting.


10:49 am March 10, 2016

Venkatesh, I believe your example illustrates the benefits of Lean and the negative impact of context-switching much more than an illustration of Scrum in daily life.


10:19 am March 11, 2016

Scrum says something called focus?. Context switching will spoil the focus ?


03:02 pm March 11, 2016

Context-switching always hurts focus.

I am fond of Jeff Sutherland's quote on the subject:

"Multitasking makes you stupid. Doing more than one thing at a time makes you slower and worse at both tasks. Don’t do it. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re wrong—it does.”

Many scientific studies have proven that if you try and juggle two different tasks, you lose 20% of your overall productivity simply switching from one task to the other (figuring out where you left off, getting back up to speed, etc). Add another 20% productivity loss for every additional task.

And if you are trying to juggle 4 separate tasks, over half of your time is being spent simply switching from one item to another. Context-switching is a huge productivity drain.


10:42 pm March 11, 2016

Hi Timothy that's what have I tried to say Scrum in daily life right. How context switching spoil focus and customer satisfaction in daily life. Let's say we go to a hotel. A single person responsible for serving our table juggle between two tables.. Customer gets frustrated and move on. So the focus is important. What I tried to say here is focus is important to achieve rest of the things like shorter feedback loop and adaptation. If there is no focus rest all would fail .. So does this not relate Scrum from our daily life?


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