I am sure there are going to be some people who think it is crazy but my wife and I have implemented Scrum for our home improvement needs. We do not have enough data to know if it is working yet to help with our home improvement delivery but it has already allowed us to understand our prioritizations and how much there is to do. Of course, my wife is the Product Owner and I am the ScrumMaster. Here is how we implemented it:

  1. We got together on a weekend morning and went through the house room-by-room and eventually cover the yard for what is left to do around the house. We captured these items on index cards in a very basic form such as “This is what we need to do in this room”. This took about 1 hour.
  2. After we had all of our initial index cards filled out we sat them on the living room floor and decided on a plan to get these prioritized. We decided that using a method to place a cost for each would be a good first step. We developed a high, medium, low, and no cost equivalent that seemed to work and placed the “H”, “M”, “L”, and “N” representing these costs on the top right corner of each card. This took about 15 minutes.
  3. We separated the index cards into their respective cost class so that we could prioritize each pile in a cost arena separate from the others. We prioritized each cost pile and went over our priorities with each other before moving on. This took about 30 minutes.
  4. After we had each pile separated and prioritized based on cost we decided to take the highest priority of the top index cards on the separate piles and add it to the Product Backlog as the next highest item. This took about 20 minutes.
  5. Now that we had a prioritized Product Backlog we decided to create a Sprint Backlog for the next 2 weeks. We captured about 12 of the top Product Backlog items and then placed them on the countertop and eventually into a wall mounted mail holder.

During the next two weeks we got to finishing off each of the Sprint Backlog items. We were not able to finish 3 of the Sprint Backlog items due to a change in the Product Owner’s taste of fabrics and solutions. So far it seems to work. We tear up the index card once it has been completed and add new index cards to the Product Backlog and reprioritize it every 2-3 weeks. Some of the things, from my point of view, that we must work on is getting into the cadence of a Sprint and figuring out what Product Backlog readiness means for our Product Backlog items.

My wife let me know that she felt a bit better knowing what we needed to do around the house. I felt better because we could recognize when items were getting completed. I hope that we are able to keep this up with a baby on the way soon and the continual increase in activities of our 3 year old daughter. When discussing a ScrumMaster in the CSM training course we always say a “Dead ScrumMaster is a useless ScrumMaster”. This may be our biggest risk. 😉

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