Becoming an Agile Family

Updated: 30 December 2015

The Scrumfamily blog is no longer being updated or actively monitored. Please read So Long, Farewell for more context about this decision and info on reaching me, should you wish to do so.

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If you’re new to my blog, this page will help you get right to the posts that are likely to interest you most. I started this blog as a chronicle of how I’m using agile and lean techniques to take the stress out of being a full-time working mother with a busy family. Along the way, I have also posted about deeper insights into life and lean-agile concepts that I’ve gained as a result of our home experiments.

For those of you who have arrived here out of curiosity, rather than by following a specific blog post link, I have created a reading path that will help you get started. If you start here, and follow the internal links in each of the posts referenced below, you should get a quick overview of our Scrumfamily, and where it all started.

For more recent posts, please see the sidebar on your right. You can also use the keyword cloud and breadcrumbs above each post to explore further yourself.

Practical Agile and Lean Techniques for Families

We started out using Scrum, but soon found out that it wasn’t working well for us. So I decided to try Personal Kanban instead. My first experiment with our kids went really well, and using a variety of kanban boards has become an integral part of our lives since then. We’ve also successfully combined kanban boards with other techniques like checklists, calendars and the all-important reward system. And we’ve learnt that we need to keep evolving our use of kanban to keep it fresh and interesting for the kids. It’s not called continuous improvement for nothing.

But I haven’t only used agile and lean principles to help me manage our kids’ lives. I use them for my own well-being (read: sanity) and to improve communication as a whole in our family. From planning our financial priorities to communicating personal goals and staying in touch with extended family, to trying to establish an exercise regime for myself, we’ve done it all. We’ve even planned and organized Christmas with great fun using kanban!

My most recent and ambitious experiment was using Personal Kanban as a personal goal calendar for the year. You can find out what happened through a series of follow-up posts.

Happy reading! 🙂