Happy May 1st, Reader!

In the past months (since about the beginning of 2023) I was spending some time each week to plan and review the work that ScrumMastered team does.

Kind of like a mini-Sprint.

I'm not extremely good at it yet, and I'm sometimes not as diligent as I should be. But I've seen big improvements on the weeks where I did a good job planning.

Really, we need a Scrum Master (who is not me) to help us stay on track with this practice.

While I'm great at helping other teams implement Scrum and Agile practices, for the life of me, I'm unable to do it for myself.

That's why we need Scrum Masters by the way

Of course, it doesn't have to be Scrum, per se. But I think it gives a great (and very easy) structure to follow.

In this email, I want to show you how you can implement it in your work life.

------------

Before I do though, I wanted to give you a quick recap of what has happened at ScrumMastered in April (since I wasn't as good at keeping you posted) and what our plans are:

• This past week I posted a video on how to read Sprint Reports in Jira.
• I also talked about how to take notes as a Scrum Master (including creating Sprint Reports for your team).
• And I shared my thoughts on the activity-based flexible offices (spoiler: I don't like them).
• We have also launch the Scrum Master Planner! A special paper planner I developed to help you stay on track with how your Scrum Team is doing.
• We are also planning a May to 20K campaign on YouTube to help us hit 20,000 subscribers before summer! It's going to be a mini-challenge with winners and prizes! So make sure to join in.

------------

1. Define your Sprint cadence.

For me 1 week makes sense because we can accomplish a big chunk of work with the team and deliver something fully Done (for example, a video, a marketing campaign, or even a product in the store). The schedule is Monday to Friday - not ideal, but it works and also leaves my weekends out of our Sprints.

2. Schedule a time block for "meetings".

You don't have to work with a team to benefit from it.

At the beginning start with a Planning session.

Better do it as early on on day one of your Sprint. ScrumMastered team meets at 10 am on Mondays.

During this time I set a goal (well, I try - there's work to do here) for this week - what is the most important thing we want to accomplish?

It's hard to balance the regular work (like posting content) and new ideas and projects. So I know the struggle of creating a single goal for the team.

Then set up a time for your review.

I do it on Fridays with myself reviewing how the week went since I don't necessarily invite stakeholders but instead review the statistics of how the videos and products are doing - is my audience liking them?

(More on Sprint Review this Thursday in my upcoming video!!!)

Then set up your Daily Scrums.

That's simple. Whether you are doing it alone or with a team (say you are part of a team of Scrum Masters in your organization), schedule 15 minutes in your calendar every day at the same time to do it.

This is something we are still trying to figure out the best way to do it with the ScrumMastered team. We are actually doing in via chat.

I know - unacceptable! But it works for us (at least for now) since we are constantly talking with each other in chat during the day.

3. Start, rinse, repeat.

The toughest part is sticking to the schedule :) and tracking your progress.

Most of the Agile teams I work with use a Kanban board (like in Jira). But I have also found it useful just to have a list of tasks.

You start with a long list of everything you can think of that needs to get done during the week, and then every day you decide what you want to do today.

We've used this approach with one of the Scrum Teams I worked with a while back.

And now we are using it with the ScrumMastered team and it works well. At least, it's quite easy to get started and you don't need any extra set up or anything.

-------------

The Scrum framework, of course, has lots of rules and elements that you need to implement if you work with a Scrum Team within an organization.

But you can also find lots of small things you can implement in your daily work to see some great benefits.

​

I definitely have noticed that when I follow our mini-Scrum schedule with planning, reviews, and dailies, we get much better results as a team. And we all feel less stressed out.

What about you? Have you tried to implement Scrum elements in your day-to-day work personally?

Share your thoughts and your results!

​