Last updated on April 4th, 2021 at 06:18 pm
Sometimes our nights go longer than expected. Couple this with the fact that family is important, and you come to a simple fact—sometimes writing an awesome blog post won’t be one’s first priority.
Sad as that is, I try my best to plan for such occurrences with a wealth of half-written content and advice provided to me by friends of mine.
Today’s is from Kenna, the brain behind Amathia Soapworks, who let me in on the SCRUM system, something she uses to keep track of things in order to keep her clients consistently clean:
Ever heard of SCRUM? It was originally designed for project management for software development but it works great in a simplified form for everything.
I use it for the soap company like so: Large poster board with four columns: Backlog, Commit, In Progress, Done. You are supposed to use one board for a project, so my main board is for soap production.
You make a stickie note for everything you need to do, if there are multiple people involved, you can use different colours of stickies for the different people. In the right-hand corner, you’re supposed to write the estimated amount of time for that task—I don’t do this part.
All stickies start in the backlog. Commit is for stickies that you are committing to do first, if a stickie stays here too long, it needs to be moved back to backlog since you obviously aren’t committed to doing it yet. When you start a task, the stickie gets moved to In Progress. Once you finish, it moves to Done.
Stickies can ride the line between two columns—for instance, if one of my soaps is in the moulds but not cut yet, it is riding the In Progress/Done line.
It’s an easy way to get everything out of your head and lay out progress mapping. On top of that, it feels awesome to see a bunch of stickies in the Done column. I clean off my board every two weeks or so.
So next time you feel like you’re stuck on a project or your to-do list, scrub (nyuk, nyuk) those brain cells clean by getting it all out on paper and using a system like this to get it all sorted out.
This is a way more formalized system than the one I proposed back in March!
–Casey E. Palmer
193/365
2 replies on “Scrum”
Wait til you get into burn down charts to measure effort and actual tasks you can take per sprint! The effort levels really give scrums that tactical feel and enables you to gauge tasks for future sprints.
I think it’s right here that I insert a smile and nod, mostly because I don’t know all the jargon 🙂 But any method that allows me to take a number of tasks and resources and do the best with them that I possibly can is a good one to me!