17/05/2021 Scrum for One

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Do what you can with what you have. Projects stall because some resource – whether it’s material, knowledge, or manpower – is
missing. Usually, though, there are plenty of things that can be done even without those resources – other parts of the system to build,
creative workarounds, standards to devise, and so on. During the planning of each stage, and in daily “check-in” meetings along the way,
these shortfalls are taken into account and work designed around them so that a lack of resources doesn’t have to create a lack of
progress.
Constant feedback. As I just mentioned, Scrum encourages daily contact between its team-members, so that a) nobody stalls and holds
up the whole project, and b) the collective knowledge of the whole team can be brought to bear on new problems in creative ways.
Meetings are short, as short as 15 minutes, and center around three questions:
1. What have you accomplished so far?
2. What will you accomplish today?
3. What’s preventing you from making progress right now?
These simple questions are meant to identify any “logjams” and break them up before they hold up the entire project.

Work towards clearly-defined short-term goals. Scrum projects are, generally-speaking, point-releases of the software under
development – that is, they are significant but relatively simple evolutionary improvements of the state of the project at the beginning of
the project. For example, a set of new functions could be implemented, an interface designed, a database structure mapped out, and so
on. “Write browser” is too big of a project, it’s realization too far off, to make for a meaningful Scrum project; “correct bug in line 1178”
too small. Ideally, as each project is completed, the software under development should be in a usable state – Scrum was developed to
deal with the contingencies of the software world, where projects often need to be rushed into market to combat a competing project, or
just to bring in an income.
Sprint. The basic working unit of Scrum is the Sprint – a focused dash towards the completion of the immediate project goals. At the
beginning of the Sprint, the team determines exactly what resources are available to them, what they intend to achieve given those
resources, and how long they’ll work on it. Then, they work on those objectives, and those objectives only. The Sprint is sacrosanct – its
members work on the project they’ve put together and nothing else until the Sprint is completed. It might be a week, it might be 30 days,
or anywhere in between – whatever time they’ve agreed on is dedicated solely to the Sprint. When it’s done, team members might rotate
out of or into the team, or be assigned to other projects, but until then – they Sprint.

Scrumming Solo
Seems to me that, with a little modification, those are pretty good principles for anyone with some big projects on their plate – especially if
you, like me, have a tendency to get side-railed. Of course, most of our projects aren’t collaborative, and they’re rarely as compartmentalized
as computer programs, either. The idea of developing a project by evolutionary steps, with each step creating a potentially usable end-product,
simply doesn’t apply to the kind of long-term projects most of us have as individuals – things like writing a book, learning a foreign language,
or earning a promotion.

But the idea of Scrum is, I think, very applicable to our personal lives. The whole point is, through a process of constant self-awareness, to
identify what’s holding us back, how we can work around it, and where the next few days or weeks should take us. Consider, then, “Scrum for
One”:

Do what you can with what you have. There are bound to be hang-ups in any project worth doing, and it’s all too easy to look at a
project and despair because you don’t have whatever you need to finish it. Well, you may not have what you need to finish, but chances
are you have what you need to start, to do at least some of the steps needed to get yourself somewhere close to the finish line. And you
can take heart from this peculiarity of Scrum: often, when working under less than ideal circumstances without all the necessities to
finish a project, Scrum teams find that either a new solution emerges that’s much more within their grasp or, just as often, that the
missing element isn’t really needed in the first place. At the worst, you’ll give yourself the time you need to come up with the missing
piece – and meanwhile you’ll be moving inexorably closer to your goal.

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