Agile4Parenting: Artefacts
We entered parenting with a vision of sharing the parental responsibility equally. As we were confronted by the parental mental load we applied some agile practices and principles we knew from our professional live in order to create the practical tools to share parental work as a team.
We refer to the evolving system as Agile4Parenting. In my previous post I discussed the roles & responsibilities how we understand them in our family. This post explores the artefacts, such as backlog, and the Agile4Parenting practices around them.
Use a shared backlog
The trouble with sharing the parenthood load is that there are a lot of invisible, repetitive tasks involved. There is a daily routine to be build anew with every new kid. This routine tend to need adaptation as the kid grow.
The parents of young children tend to be confronted by new decisions constantly, whereas needing to maintain a routine of rather boring though necessary tasks and being constantly stressed by unexpected events and a lack of sleep.
It is a complex and stressful environment to navigate. Sharing this burden means many a thing needs to be negotiated, communicated and noted.
We started to note common tasks in a form of a shared backlog long before becoming parents. For example, we had a physical kanban-board to organise our wedding party. We used a digital backlog of to-dos while building our house.
It was quite obvious that the parenting responsibilities where added on the shared to-do list together with all the other tasks we shared, like cleaning the house or paying bills.
Everything can be put on the shared backlog by anyone. However, the task is only acted upon once it is communicated and prioritised. Though some to-dos can be dealt with by only one person in a family, putting them on a shared backlog emphasise the shared responsibility for the task and helps to create the transparency.
Write things down to create transperancy
Transparency is highly valued at the agile mindset, it is defined as one of three pillars of scrum and the basis for empiricism.
We try to create transparency by maintaining shared notes, to-dos, calendars and so on.
While holding responsibility for a job and parenting, our brains are often so full with tasks and thoughts that we are constantly on a border of being overwhelmed. We try to show mercy to our brains and note everything down.
If there is a to-do on a top of the mind and it is not dealt with right at the moment, it gets on a to-do list. After that it can be forgotten and allows more brain-space for other tasks.
Appointments, to-dos, notes, shopping lists, alarms, you name it. Without our smartphones and the internet we are lost.
Shared application to make knowledge accessible real-time
We created a shared informational infrastructur in order to minimize the necessity of asking e.g. on what is planed and where to find what.
We use technical solutions that allow us to share all kind of sources in real-time: calendars, documents, to-do-lists and notes, shopping lists, information on baby well-being, grocery shopping app, smart-home applications.
While there are surely a wide choice of technical solutions that can be used, we are happy to share our preferred providers.
We use a Google shared calendar to coordinate all the appointments and Google drive for shared documents.
Trello is our app to go for the shared backlog, to-do-lists and any kind of lists and notes, like a packing list for traveling with children.
We have recently changed to Bring it! for shopping lists. It works fairly well with Amazon Alexa and allows us to add missing items to the list while e.g. cooking. Unfortunately, there is no integration to our preferred shopping app Picnic. We dream of a feature to transform Bring it! shopping lists directly to an order.
We used Baby Daybook with both our babies to document baby-related activities like nursing, sleeping, meds, etc. and to share in real time. This spared us a daily briefing on babies well-being.
We share apps for our vacuuming robots, washing machine and other smart-home devices to see if a task has been started and finished.
We are so used to this infrastructure by now that it is hard to imagine how we could deal with all this information otherwise.
Tasks description: definition-of-done and acceptance criteria
We have agreed on a general definition on what a task includes in our home. This is close to a concept of the Definition-of-Done (DoD), used in agile development. Being responsible for an issue in our family includes the pre- and post-processing like creating appointments, planing, packing, cleaning up and paying the bills for the issue.
For example, the task like repairing a chair includes the process of cleaning up after it. So if there are still tools lying around on a kitchen table, the task is not done. Or if someone takes kids to the doctor, that person is responsible for packing the making an appointment, packing the snacks and making sure that the diaper back is re-filled after the appointment.
This DoD allows us to share the mental load and clarify the responsibilities without negotiating them every time anew.
Sometimes we still need aligning on what exactly a task that we are discussing includes and when it is actually considered as done. For example, we figured out that we had a very different understanding of what “cleaning a bathroom” task is about. For this we sometimes rely on the widely used practise of acceptance criteria, defining the concrete criteria that needs to be archived for a task to be considered as done.
Backlog prioritisation
The understanding of what tasks actually need to be thought of and done is different in different people. People offen have different thresholds on when they take care of a task, depending on their working style, individual likings and upbringing. For example, some families do laundry when the laundry basket is somewhat full. Other families do laundry three times a week. Yet other families do laundry when they lack clean clothes. If one person cannot stand full laundry basket and the other waits for their closet to lack fresh socks, the only way to share the task and to avoid conflict is to negotiate about the task and agree when and how it should be done.
By noting the tasks on the backlog we make them explicit. By negotiating the priority of a task regularly – weekly in our family – we make sure to create a common understanding on how urgent and important a task is.
Stop doing unnecessary work
Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
Agile Manifesto
We find it helpful to constantly consider if a task needs to be on the backlog in the first place. Does completing a task brings us value or can it be just dropped? The family resources are limited and sometimes one just needs to prioritise.
For example, we started to order our groceries more often then not, making our time-consuming grocery shopping obsolete. Our garden can have used some more weeding this summer, but gardening, which we generally enjoy, feels more like a burden now.
Just asking ourselves, if some re-occurring tasks can be done less often, can leave some time for important activities such as playing with kids or resting. Agreeing on not doing a task is not laziness, it is an ability to prioritise and to avoid waste.
Automate
One of the efficient ways to stop doing things is automation.
If a task can be automated, automate it.
We are in a privileged position to allow ourselves to be helped out by vacuuming & mowing robots and some smarthome automation. We rely on automated synchronisation of different lists, apps and automatic reminders anywhere possible. Automation does not only help us to skip a task execution, but also lessens the mental load.
Stay tuned
In the next post I am going to discuss the Agile4Parenting practices concerning the events we use to plan and iterate in our agile parenting team. Stay tuned.