Maybe you’ve tried buying a big pile of books, registering for online courses, or writing out a list of skills you want to develop but are still struggling to progress in your personal or professional development. If that’s the case, I think you’ll be interested to see how Scrum can help you.

Most people start the year making new years resolutions and begin with enthusiasm, only to lose steam by spring break and not even remember them by the summer. 

Imagine what it might feel like to come to the end of the year and have completed your top 5 priorities related to personal or professional development.

That type of progress is achievable once you have clarity about your goal and a system to help you stay on track. In this article, I’ll explain how Scrum can provide this for you.

Here’s what I’m going to cover:

• How Scrum enables you to get things done.
• How I use Scrum to manage my professional development.
• Things to consider for your setup.

How Scrum enables you to get things done.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in new ideas. There’s a flurry of excitement around what’s possible and how it could solve significant problems. 

The problem is when you move to something new, it’s at the expense of what you were focusing on, leaving a wake of started but unfinished projects. 

Scrum helps you to stop starting and start finishing, and it does this by providing just the right amount of structure to time and attention. 

Scrum provides a window of focus.

Scrum organizes time into sprints, which can be any length of time, often one or two weeks. You begin the sprint by selecting what work you will complete by the end of the sprint, and this will require you to break big projects or tasks down into smaller pieces. 

The work you select goes into your sprint backlog, which is the list of tasks you will complete by the end of the sprint. No new work enters this list during the sprint. The time is protected, allowing you to focus on finishing what has been selected.

Each day you will review progress using the questions:

1. What did I complete yesterday?
2. What will I focus on finishing today?
3. Where am I stuck?

Usually, you’d ask these questions during the daily standup within the context of a team. For personal development projects, you might be a team of one, but you may also include anyone else who lives with you as maybe they are a stakeholder.

When you’ve decided to focus on a task from your sprint backlog, work it to completion. Don’t select another task until completed. Keep your work-in-progress limits to a minimum.

Scrum provides clear prioritization.

On a typical Scrum team, one person plays the product owner role. They work with internal and external stakeholders and the production team to prioritize all the work to be done. 

The backlog contains a list of all the tasks and is ordered by priority. What’s at the top is most important. There are no ties, just a cleanly ordered list. When you maintain the disciple of ordering your backlog, you’re not only finishing work, you're completing the work that matters most. 

How I use Scrum to manage my professional development

The past ten years have been a fun journey of learning new skills and leveling up current ones. I love to learn, so it was like being a kid in a candy store. I was exploring courses, training, 30-day challenges, mentorship, books, portfolio projects… you name it.

I wanted to learn so many topics, but when I tried to do all of them at once, I never made meaningful progress in any of them.  I needed focus.

One of the subjects I was learning more about at the time was Scrum. So I thought, “Why not use Scrum to learn Scrum?”

As I mentioned, I was trying to do too much at once. I needed to triage my learning plans. I started by first setting a goal that could guide these decisions. I identified three areas I wanted to grow in and the level I wanted to attain for each.

To set meaningful goals, you need to know where you’re heading. What’s the long-term plan? What’s your vision for a future version of you? Take some time to work through this. 

Clarity about the end will be essential if you want clarity about the here and now. If you want some help working through your priorities, try this 5-day priorities challenge.

Building a professional development backlog.

I started by gathering all the development options I had considered and writing them on the whiteboard. I looked for ones that supported the three-part goal I had set for myself. These got prioritized and grouped together. 

I went back and looked through each area one at a time and asked, “Will this get me to my goal?” and “What do I need that’s missing?” Once this was complete, I had a clearer sense of what I needed to do to reach my goals. 

I added all these development opportunities to the backlog and ordered it by priority and dependencies. If I wanted to earn a certification that depended on another certification, then they should be prioritized in the order I can achieve them.

Most of these learning opportunities need to be broken down into small tasks so they could be completed in a shorter amount of time. Breaking them down gave me more granularity to prioritize tasks across different opportunities.

Now that I had clarity regarding where I was trying to go and at least initial clarity about what I needed to get there, I was ready to begin.

My Scrum professional development workflow

Scrum organizes time into sprints, usually one to three weeks long, to timebox the work you’re committing to complete.

I went with a two-week sprint because it gave me the best balance between focus and flexibility. I stayed focused for those two weeks on what was selected but could still have the flexibility to adjust as needs or opportunities changed. 

Before the sprint began, I set a sprint goal which provided a picture of what I hoped would be the result of the next two weeks. The sprint goal guides what gets selected from the backlog. I focused on the top of the backlog because that is what I had prioritized, but the goal provided guidance and flexibility if something a little further down the list made sense to do now. 

Once I had selected development items from the backlog, I would place them on my sprint board in the column labeled “to-do” I would then move one or two tasks to “doing” and focus on them until they were complete. 

I kept my work-in-progress limit to two, so I could stay focused, maintain momentum and bring learning tasks to completion before beginning new ones. This constraint felt like a discipline at first, but over time I was motivated because I had the experience from the progress I was making.

Each evening I would evaluate and plan using the following three questions:

1. What did I get done today?
2. What will I do to grow tomorrow?
3. Where am I stuck?

This daily cadence kept me focused and moving forward. 

At the end of the sprint, I would evaluate what I finished and how things went. I discovered specific times of day or days of the week worked better for different kinds of learning. I took what I learned and applied it to the next sprint.

Tools I used for professional development.

I’ve used Trello, Asana and Monday to organize my ongoing professional development, and they have similar feature sets and good freemium functionality. Right now though I'm using ClickUp and I really like it. It has the same functionality (and more) but at a lower price point. I also took advantage of several learning platforms, including Coursera, LinkedIn Learning and Skillshare.

Things to consider for your setup

Are you ready to get started? Here are a few things to keep in mind as you progress ahead. These are primarily lessons learned from my own experience.

How confident are you in your end goal? 

Maybe you clearly know how you want to develop. That’s awesome! It’s also uncommon. 

Most people have an idea of areas they want to grow in but aren’t sure if they will still be interested once they get into it. You may want to iterate with small steps to validate the plan. Is there an MVP (minimum viable product) of the skillset you want to develop?

A portfolio-building project is an excellent opportunity to both develop skills and apply them to something in the real world. If you finish and feel like you never want to do it again, that’s a crucial insight. But if you can’t wait to do another, that’s also critical to recognize. 

Learning platforms and certifications.

There are a lot of options out there for taking classes and earning certifications. I’ve reviewed some of my favorite learning platforms and shared my experience with certifications. 

It can be easy to want to just check a box by finishing a course or gaining a certification. But remember, your goal is growth and opportunity. These are tools to help you get to your goals. Don’t trade in your goals for just a nice set of tools.

Don't forget about relationships.

Learning is a journey and not one you should take alone. Look for mentors ahead of you whose experience you can learn from. Look for peers alongside you who you can share the ups and downs of the journey with. Look for someone earlier in their journey who you could help. Teaching is also an excellent way to refine your own understanding.

Practice makes perfect.

I’ve found daily challenges to be as helpful to my growth as any class I’ve taken. They help you sharpen your growing skills, give you a feeling for what it looks like to do that kind of work each day and often expose you to others in the same field. 

Portfolio-building projects are another great way to practice. Do you want to develop the skill needed to be an app developer? Then you’ll need a portfolio that includes that kind of work. You could begin by designing the UX/UI of a hypothetical app that would solve a real-world problem.

Next Steps

I hope you’ve found this article helpful and that you feel prepared to go and level up your professional skills. Looking back over the past few years, I’m encouraged by what I see. You can be too. 

If you use Scrum to help you learn and grow, I’d love to hear about it. You can reach me on LinkedIn.

If you want to learn more about Scrum in general,  check out my What is Scrum? A Guide for Everyday People to Learn Scrum.

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.

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