A 5-day journey to living from your priorities

It’s easy to spend our day reacting to what comes at us. What if you could be proactive, intentionally making decisions based on your priorities? It is possible!

Our five-day short course guides you through the process of identifying your life priorities and scaling them day to everyday decisions. You’ll learn how to establish a rhythm to build good habits and grow a team that will be with you in the journey.

If you’ve been curious about Scrum and begun learning or exploring it, you’re the person I wrote my FAQ for.

I’ve had so many people ask me about Scrum over the years.

  • Where do I go to learn Scrum?
  • How does it apply to my kind of work?
  • What exactly is this Scrum thing?

I would mostly answer questions ad hoc or point them to an article I had found helpful.

This year though, I’ve begun working on a guide for applying Scrum to everyday life. It’s not finished yet, but I completed the first pass of an FAQ section.

That FAQ section turned out to be more extensive than I initially planned. Mostly because I realized there are A LOT of questions people have about Scrum.

After working through almost 100 questions, here are 3 takeaways that surfaced for me.

  1. Scrum does have its own language.
  2. Scrum is easy to learn but hard to master.
  3. There are different paths to Scrum.

Scrum does have its own language.

I had a lot of “What is…?” questions because Scrum introduces many new concepts. You have the roles, the events, the artifacts, the values, the pillars…

Here are just the “What is…?” questions:

Just keeping all the words straight is a challenge for many when they begin to learn Scrum.

But you must first understand the basic parts to learn how they interact and relate to one another. This brings up questions like:

This is just a sampling and leads to my second takeaway.

Scrum is easy to learn but hard to master.

While it’s a bit cliche, the saying certainly holds true.

Scrum is quite simple by design. And its power is in the daily application of this simplicity. It's not easy for an individual to alter their behavior and can be pretty challenging for teams or organizations to change.

And this is why scrum can be hard to master.

Scrum requires you and your team to work in a new way, and it’s tempting to import old behaviors or schemas that aren’t very compatible with Scrum.

I often get asked if the current team leader can just be the scrum master and product owner. Or how to add all these new scrum meetings on top of all the current meetings.

Both of these questions come from a desire to hold onto the old while trying to embrace the new. You can’t do both.

Questions abound again regarding the relationship between Scrum and the team or the organization.

Knowing all the pieces of Scrum is the first step, but these questions illustrate how learning the parts doesn’t equal understanding the whole.

There are different paths to Scrum.

Friends ask me a lot if they should get various scrum certifications, and my answer depends on their current situation and goals.

Certifications have a role to play, but sitting in a three-day training does not make you a scrum master. Certificates can be helpful for:

  • Providing a structured way to learn the basics about scrum.
  • Checking the box for a job application that requires a specific certification.
  • Introducing you to others interested in Scrum (both instructors and fellow students).

I organized questions about certifications into 4 groups.

  1. Scrum certifications
  2. Scrum master certifications
  3. Product owner certifications
  4. Comparing certification

I see a more common path to scrum through practice, evaluation and repetition. If you’re interested in Scrum, two approaches you may want to consider include:

  1. Gain proximity to a Scrum team.
  2. Start practicing elements of scrum in your everyday life.

Gain proximity to a Scrum team.

Joining an existing scrum team is probably the best way to learn as you get to see it up close from people who already have understanding and experience. But this might not be an option if no teams in your organization are practicing scrum, and your reason for wanting to learn it is to apply it to your current team.

You can also gain proximity through existing Scrum communities, either online or locally. This won’t be the same as working daily within a scrum team, but it still gives you a window of insight and opportunities to build relationships with others practicing scrum.

Start practicing elements of scrum in your everyday life.

Starting small lets you experiment and discover not just the what but the how and why of practicing scrum.

Here are a few questions from people checking it out.

I’ve experimented with using Scrum to organize my home DIY projects, manage writing work and homeschool my kids.

The beautiful part of Scrum is you’re not expected to be perfect on the first try. Scrum is designed for you to evaluate and improve as you iterate.

So give it try.

Think about an area of your life you would like to have better prioritization and focus. And begin experimenting with how you can apply the essentials of Scrum to that area.

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What if it took the same amount of work to engage and serve 100 people as it would for 10? Let’s map out your workflows and processes and then adapt them in order to impact others at scale.

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Scrum FAQs

If you want to see all the questions from the FAQ, you can find them in my Scrum Guide for Everyday People or you can browse them below.

What is Scrum?

How to use Scrum

Learning to apply Scrum

Scrum team

Scrum roles

Scrum master role

Scrum master responsibilities

Scrum master and product owner

Product owner

Development team

Scrum events overview

Beginning a sprint

Middle of a sprint

Ending a sprint

Facilitating scrum events

Scrum events responsibilities

Scrum events purpose

Scrum design

Scrum elements

Scrum backlog

Agile story points

Scrum certifications

Scrum master certifications

Product owner certifications

Comparing certification

Scrum user stories

Acceptance criteria

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To learn more about Scrum, check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

Still not sure about your next step with Scrum? I offer a couple of free coaching sessions each month. You can signup for a free 1-hour coaching session, and we can work together to identify a good next step for you.

A 5-day journey to living from your priorities

It’s easy to spend our day reacting to what comes at us. What if you could be proactive, intentionally making decisions based on your priorities? It is possible!

Our five-day short course guides you through the process of identifying your life priorities and scaling them day to everyday decisions. You’ll learn how to establish a rhythm to build good habits and grow a team that will be with you in the journey.

This post is part of an upcoming guide called Everyday Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum where I will explore and explain the key elements of Scrum.

Perhaps you have heard about Scrum but are not exactly sure what it is. Or maybe you know some about it but are not sure how to apply it, especially outside a software development context.

You find my my current and future guides on everyday.design. Signup to be the first to know when new guides are released.

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There are a lot of new terms when learning the Scrum essentials, and this post probably introduced you to some of the vocabulary.

If you want to learn more about specific Scrum topics, here are a few to choose from or check out the scrum FAQs.

Applying Scrum

Agile in Everyday Life

Scrum Roles

Scrum Meetings

Scrum General Topics

Scrum Advanced Topics

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To learn more about Scrum, check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum. If you have more questions, please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn.

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FAQs

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