Thanks for joining us in our agile-at-home series. Today we're discussing the family backlog with at-home agilist, mom, and Scrum Alliance® Certified Team CoachSM Emilia Breton. She's founder and editor of Agile Toybox and a member of the Launching New Voices committee for Women in Agile.
Breton Offers a Glimpse into How Agilists Experience Change
On the bizarre day when “pandemic” became an official declaration and “shelter in place” a new way of living, Breton was away from her family with her husband at Agile Open and Agile Games Day San Diego. She was 600 miles from her daughters, feeling relieved that presenting on agile games had necessitated driving in lieu of flying — she would be able to get home to her family before the lockdowns began.
“A lot of people were getting notifications that their companies were shutting down as of that day,” Breton remembers. “And one of my good friends, who's an agile coach, Paul Tevis, walks up to the open space board and puts up a tag of virtual facilitation. That's how quick the pivot was. And it was like, ‘We're now being called to this change.’ And what we need to do is figure out how we are going to do our job on Monday. … Are all of us as agile as we're really talking about? … It was the most collaborative time between agile coaches and agile trainers that I think I've ever seen.”
Breton’s household pivot did not begin on the first day of the lockdowns, but rather when it became clear that calling off school indefinitely could not continue.
“We had four weeks with no school here,” she said. “Zero school. And that's when we started. … It all sort of came up because we were trying to figure out: How do we make this chaos not quite so chaotic?”
She soon began exchanging pandemic survival lessons with the other agilists in her life.
“That was one of the times when being a Scrum Alliance coach and having that coaching community was so huge,” she said. “Because everybody was coming together and just sharing what we'd learned, what we were doing. ‘Here's this thing that I built that anybody can use. Is this useful to you? Here's the epic fail that I had in my class this week. And why you should, you know, make sure you check the Zoom before you log on.’”
She said she leveraged one of the agile games she uses to coach leaders, called Flux, to help her daughters and household adjust to a world in which the rules change so rapidly and often.
“Every card you play, the rules change,” Breton explained. “And you can play cards and change the goal and how you win changes. It was super effective for them because we used it to talk about change, talk about the changes that they were going through, about what they were feeling, and how they're feeling when the rules changed in the game, because that leads to frustration, particularly with tiny humans. And that’s how the rules were changing in what we could do and what we couldn't do.”
Though her husband’s time and attention were dedicated to their home and children, the household workload increased substantially with everyone home. Their daughters were unaccustomed to the contributions the family now needed them to make.
“They were adjusting to all these changes with school and friends and playing,” she said. “It was: ‘And now you need to actually learn to be a responsible human and put your cup in the dishwasher.’”
Related: How Scrum & Scrum Teams Work
5 Scrum Tips & Guidance for Agility in Family Projects
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Develop a Sprint Backlog for Your Household: Simply put, if you hope to increase what you accomplish and to prioritize without feeling immense stress, put those to-dos all in a visible place: your backlog. Then, create three columns: to do, doing, and done.
Breton has several backlogs, but the family’s backlog and Kanban board live on sticky notes on the French doors. It contains the household chores, but also fun her daughters hope to have.
“For us, they live on our French doors, which, conveniently, are nice and set up in swimlanes,” Breton says. “In the first column, we have all of the things that we plan to do this week, and then we have a doing column, which are the things that everybody's working on currently. And then we have a done column. And we really celebrate things when they make it in there.
“The girls also have their school backlogs,” she explained. “Sometimes they have synchronous classes with their teachers. And those days, for that stuff, we don't use backlogs, but then they also have asynchronous days. Those are days where they get one big chunk of work from their teachers. Then we split them up into individual sticky notes and they get to decide what their priority is and how they're going to align the priority of doing their work. And then they move them across.”
Pro tip: Physically place your board in a highly visible location. Though Breton’s family experimented with a virtual board in Trello, they found it too easy to forget. Instead, for those daily backlogs, Breton’s family purchased a piece of showerboard from a hardware store.
“So if they're working from their school desks, they sit by their school desks,” she said. “If they want to work from the backyard, or they want to work from their room, then they can take their backlog with them.”
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Sprint Plan & Assign a Facilitator: Scrum practitioners operate within sprints of anywhere from one week to a month. Each Sprint begins immediately after the other ends. Prioritizing the family team’s backlog items often falls to the family Product Owner, though ultimately these decisions must be made with the whole team. It can be helpful if this is not the same person as the Scrum Master, who facilitates the family’s Scrum events (meetings) and helps remove impediments.
“Once a week, we can get together, we can have a discussion, we can decide on things, decide on what the current value of things are,” Breton said. “So, with the kids on their school backlogs, they're 100 percent the Product Owner, within parameters, so they do have to have the things that came from the teacher. Then we add in some other things that are just for fun. There's a limit to them being the Product Owner there. When it comes to our household stuff, I am the Product Owner. Our roommate is a Certified ScrumMaster®. And he does sort of the Scrum Master duties.”
Her family Sprint Planning runs between 30 and 45 minutes, a Saturday ritual after breakfast.
“Sunday morning is the one day that breakfast doesn't consist of toast or cereal just kind of please, please, please eat your food before you run to your Zoom,” Breton said. “We'll move ‘done’ stuff from the backlog in because I know there's the same amount of laundry every week. You still have to eat five times a week, dinners. ...So everybody will sign up for what they want to do.
Pro tip: It is common to poorly detail projects and overestimate the household’s Sprint capacity at first. Informed by how much was completed in previous sprints, the Breton household knows roughly what can be accomplished. Follow your breadcrumb trail to predict capacity.
“At the beginning, we would put a lot of stuff that was more than we could really do,” Breton explains. “We sort of learned, OK, we can do this many things. And it's usually the same. … We know we can do about four small fun things or two big fun things.
“Sometimes we under plan, and we'll have, we'll pull in some other fun things, or we'll have a discussion about what we want to do, because we've got extra, sometimes we don't get it all done. So we know that's something we wanted to do next week.”
The commitment to the family as a team encourages progress, though Breton said she struggles with the agile principle of sustainable pace.
“It's OK, if it doesn't all get done,” she said. “It was a guess. It was a forecast. And sometimes we just have to let it go, at the same time balancing that with, ‘we committed, this is what we were going to do together.’”
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Prioritize Your Team’s Values on the Board: For Breton’s family, happiness and taking care of each other rank high in value, so the household prioritizes tasks associated with these values. This serves a dual purpose of making the board more than a task list and of helping everyone enjoy the experience of accomplishment as a part of the household team. Before their children came along, fun rarely made it into the family backlog, Breton said.
“We used a technique I use for vision mapping with executives,” she explained. “But I used it with my girls, which was, ‘Let's put down all of the words that mean family to us.’ And we wrote them down. My little one, obviously, needed help. And we put them all up on one of our portable whiteboards. And so you see just all these words, sort of in a word cloud, that’s what out family means. Then we started saying, ‘Well, which ones are like each other?’ And we kind of came up with some different themes around togetherness, around playing together. And then based on those, we have them. And we've laser cut them onto vinyl because we're also a maker house. And we sort of have them put up on the area that's above our French doors. And we look at them, and we talk about them. When we're moving our sticky notes to the side for the week. We see like, are we having fun? Are we together? Are we learning?”
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Associate Value Your Family Scrum Team Understands: Though the board itself increases visibility and accountability, defining the value of each card encourages tasks be done promptly. In Breton’s family’s case, monetary value for chore-related cards decreases each Sprint (week) to encourage each task’s timely completion.
“Value declines when you're talking about real product stories,” Breton said. “The longer it takes to deliver something, the more problematic it's going to be and less helpful. …It is important that each card represents the value of having that task done, not just the work of it. If a bucket of clothes does not get put away this week, then it'll still be on the backlog next week, but it won't be as valuable”
Breton explained that she weights fun stuff heavily to ensure the backlog truly represents the family values.
“Right now, our girls are spending so much time attached to a screen, because that's where they see their friends,” she said. “That's where they see their grandparents. That's where their school is. We really have to highly prioritize that non-screen time kids stuff. ...I think the top three or four are all fun family things. ...It also kind of lets them see the board is not just chores.”
Anybody on the family team can add an item to the backlog as a request for the family to discuss and prioritize.
“There is stuff on the backlog that my husband owns that are not things my husband would usually do,” Breton said. “American Girl spa day is not in my very techie husband's usual repertoire of things dad would think to do. But that is something that is on the backlog because the girls added it.”
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Celebrate: Remember that sticker chart from when you were a kid? While the “Done” column replicates it with sticky note flair, the family Kanban board makes visible the magic a team accomplishes by being agile together. Celebrate that magic, whether by the task or by the project, and especially with rewards you can all enjoy together. Family life comes with a special and often inevitable chaos — agility helps you direct its flow in the direction of the values that matter the most to you as a team.
Related: Read More in the "Scrum at Home & Personal Agility" Collection
Making Agile Practices Work Well in Your Everyday Life
When it comes to leveraging Scrum and agility for all of the projects in your daily life, it helps to have a foundation in these frameworks, techniques, and principles from your work life. For Breton, agile principles and practices helped her plan her wedding, then the family holidays, so much so that when her entire family started “living at work and school” in March of 2020, they soon slipped into the comforting familiarity of a family backlog and Sprint Planning sessions on Saturday mornings.
“I live in a world of magical people,” she said. “Before we had our children, and my husband was working, he was an agile developer. Our roommate is a Scrum Master. I'm obviously an agile coach. So agile values are part of our values.
“(Now), there really isn't the kind of nagging, because we go look at the board,” she said. “‘So what are you going to do? I'm working on this one.’ So it's easy to say, ‘Mom is cleaning the bathroom? So what are you gonna do right now?’ I don't spend nearly as much time kind of being the mean mom.”
Once integrated, applying these concepts at home offers benefits, such as increased and improved communication, less nagging from the family product owners, and productivity in the areas that matter most.
A Plus Side to a Pandemic: Compassion in the at-Home Workplace
Breton said she has changed, as an at-home agilist and as a professional. She praised the benefits of witnessing each person on her team at work in their home environment. It cultivated compassion, she explained, to see them as family members and pandemic survivors with lives that influence how they show up each day.
“When I was working from home previously, if I was on a client call, I'd be really worried about the kids coming out here, or people seeing them, or doing a class and having it seem unprofessional or something like that,” she said. “Now, I've said things like: ‘So if you hear screaming in the background, I promise nobody's actually dying. But today, there's no school so the children are on the other side of the wall. I promise nobody's actually being murdered. There is adult supervision.’”
Her daughters learned to crawl through the dog door, below visibility, during video conferencing calls, staying low until they had identified who was on screen. Now her children and her colleague’s children join meetings to see each other.
“Prior to the pandemic, we knew each other had children, but they were sort of ethereal,” she said. “We’d know their names and ages, the theoretical children. ...Now it'll be like, do I see a screen full of a bunch of people? That's probably a class. Not so much with crawling on mom. Oh, that's, you know, Renae, Simon and Brian, I can just come and use mama as a jungle gym.”
She said she hopes the increase in compassion each person has for colleagues lives on long after the pandemic.
“I have seen it most prominently in Retrospectives,” Breton said. “There is far less, ‘why didn't you’ or ‘you should have’ and far more inquiry and curiosity. … Knowing the whole person (I hope) that we don't go back to our work masks, where we have theoretical children, where our offices are always totally neat and tidy.”
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