My first week on a Scrum sprint felt very foreign but went surprisingly smooth. Though I had my hesitations about our transformation, I felt our team communication had improved, and we were all on the same page about priorities. It was a good feeling that we accomplished everything we set out to do for the week (though we probably didn’t take on as much as we could have out of hesitation for the unknown). In addition, the actual visualization of tasks being divided up and worked on together has allowed me to plan out, delegate, and execute my week in an efficient manner.
Planning
When working on projects in the past, I had a tendency to put down a project when approached with a blocker. I would move on to other things and, at times, would push out timelines longer than necessary when waiting on others. This structured format has created a sense of focus on a select set of assignments and has held everyone accountable during our daily meetings. Instead of taking months to complete a project, I now try to think of and accomplish everything in smaller portions. Reframing my mindset encourages me to move at a faster pace, thus making my work days less stress-filled and more productive.
Delegating
There have been times throughout my career when I struggled with delegating projects that I have ownership of, but after a week of scrum, I feel much better about asking for help. If there is something that I feel like I can’t complete, I know that I can reach out to members of my team and get a new set of eyes on the task at hand. What is fantastic about Stack Moxie is that everyone has skills that they excel at, which makes it easy to know who the expert is to team up with on projects. If there is a subtask in my project that I know someone would do better at than me, I feel less guilty about delegating or asking for collaboration on it.
Executing
It has been very beneficial to use Teamwork, a project management software, to visualize how much time I have tasked myself for the week and if there is room for collaboration from others. I feel my week fly by because I’m always busy working on something and trying to meet my own deadlines. At times, I did feel like I underestimated how long a project would take. Moving forward, I hope to learn from each week and be able to set more realistic goals for the hours I have available. Scrum has created an open work environment that allows us to say how much time we all can give each week openly and without judgment.