Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Agile - not just for technology any more


A fellow volunteer of the PMI Agile Community of Practice pointed me to this article on non-software uses of Scrum. As someone that has been using agile for some time, I'm not surprised at some of the uses. Think about how much we do in our day to day life that is really projects and how any project can benefit from the right amount of structure. If I can save 1 additional trip to the hardware store with a little planning, it's worth it.

I even have my wife doing Kanban. I set up a board on Trello and she is adding tasks for me; things to do around the house. We haven't started doing daily stand-ups, but I can look at what she put on the "to-do" column and discuss with her what is next on the list that needs to be done in the upcoming weekend. 

I didn't tell her she was doing Kanban. I think I'll let her get used to the idea first, then maybe introduce her to the book Personal Kanban. I know with some of my clients, they became apprehensive when I started using terms they weren't familiar with so I didn't want to get hung up in terminology now.