I am relatively new to being agile and have been assuming the role of Scrum Master for the last five months. When it was decided that my department would adopt Agile, I immediately fell in love with what I saw as a philosophy for continuous objective improvement. As such the Scrum Master role seems to fit me like a glove.
My enthusiasm for my new role (and the lack of any other takers) has landed me in the situation where I am the SM for three agile teams! I am still learning under the excellent mentorship of @ReevesHall, and as good as his teaching is, I question if I am doing an effective job, especially being spread across this many teams whilst I am this early on in my agile journey!
I need a personal planning session, daily scrum, review, retrospective!
Enter the Bullet Journal! I am sure I am not the first to realise this, but withing moments of stumbling on the Bullet Journal format, I could see the potential to adopt this as some kind of Scrum Journal/Agile Journal (ScJo or AgJo? Hmmm that doesn't work).
If you are unfamiliar with Bullet Journals and you jump onto google now you will be bombarded with tonnes of content from some incredibly talented people with too much time on their hands! It has been a smash hit with millions of people's inner artist, which is part of the appeal as it allows for creative freedom under its framework (sound familiar?).
However the meat of what drew me to this format is the mechanics of the framework! I will hand over to this video from the inventor of the system @rydercarroll to give a quick explanation.
I think it is apparent that with very little modification that this tool can fit into a personal scrum-like model (I am still playing with how exactly so watch this space!) But what about empirical measurements?! Well trackers are a big thing in the BuJo world and can certainly be deployed to measure things like - Number of interactions with teams, time spent with teams/training, Scrum ceremony attendance numbers etc. Armed with these figures you can deploy experiments and measure if they have the desired effect.
Anyway this is all very early days but I am really looking forward to trying this out to help me be effective for my team mates and reporting my findings. Have you heard of this application of the BuJo? Have you tried it? Do you see any potential fatal flaws? I would love to hear your thoughts! I hope you found this interesting and will subscribe for my future blog posts. Be seeing you!