Wedding Planning — using Agile.
As a visual designer and scrum master, I decided — why not try to plan an wedding using agile methodologies. Working in an agile environment for the past two years has lead me to approach projects in another light and can help reduce the complexity in our everyday lives. Just think of how much you can learn if you apply agile to a project outside of the “software development lifecycle”. It has helped me gain a new perspective and a better understanding of the basic principles that make up agile methodologies.
Last October, when my fiancé proposed, I was very excited — but then started to think about how overwhelming planning a wedding can be. So after doing some research and seeing all of the different aspects of the wedding, I started to think of it in agile terms.
Rather than trying to solve the challenge of planning a wedding, I started to realize that I could take on small pieces of the project and continuously work though the challenges in smaller tangible deliverables, which would lead to a less overwhelming and stressful process.
So you’re probably still thinking — how the hell can a software development process, like agile, be evolved into a wedding planning process?
Let’s take a journey and think about agile through a different lens. Remember that agile can be simple, fun and easy to learn — when you take it out the idea of agile relating to ‘work’.
Planning
As a visual designer, I always think about the sprint zero — or the upfront work that is needed before we can start working on a project. This is when the team starts to shape up there understanding of a project and who they are designing/developing for.
As designers, we call this the research phase where all team members get involved in understanding the end user. Let’s think for a second about who the end users are when you have planned your own wedding? Take a moment to just think about some of these personas.
Let’s dive into talking about our main persona’s for this project. The users are the people that will be impacted by the decisions made throughout the planning process, such as the guests or the bride and groom.
Understanding each persona is key. As a designer, I always focus on doing persona analysis to ensure that I am understanding the goals and vision of each persona throughout the design process. This situation is no different. It is key to put yourself in the shoes, or heels, of each persona and understand what each user is thinking.
The bride “ has so much to plan — because she wants the perfect wedding” and the groom “ wants his fiancé to be happy, so he is ready to help.” Since these two personas have a clear vision of what they want their wedding to be they take on the role of product owner.
The vendor, as well as family members and wedding party, have a vested interest in the wedding because “they want to understand the needs of the bride/groom” so that the bride and groom will be happy. The team consist of the family members and stakeholders that will be helping to support the bride and groom as needed to complete the tasks.
The guests “are excited, because this wedding should be a fun time!” They are one of the most important users because they are the ones enjoying their experiences and sharing memories with the couple who are getting married.
Grooming
When starting the backlog, I decided early on that I will keep the epics in the backlog rather than break them out the stories until they are in a high enough priority on the backlog. This is because, when planning a wedding it is crucial to see the bigger picture and the order of events that need to happen.
For example, we need to make sure we have a venue before we start planning the honeymoon — that is something that can be planned out at a later stage. This allows me to take a glimpse at the backlog and understand what chunks of the project are needed to be finished.
Using these epics, I was able to create a project road map. This helps to make sure that the majority of the priorities are done within the specified timeframe. Being organized and meeting deadlines is a key part of making this project a success. For this type of project, the team would need to be working in two week sprints to be actively keeping pace in order to meet the ultimate deadline of the wedding.
I thought about doing a Kanban project, but I was afraid of using Kanban with a remote team, it may be hard to keep track of the progress and make sure that the tasks were being completed in the necessary time frame.
Now, this is the fun part, breaking down the epics into stories and adding acceptance criteria, in a way that makes sense for the team (wedding party) and the user.
When writing my stories, I had found that the acceptance criteria was typically depended on the outcome of previous stories, so I waited until they were ready to be pulled into the sprint before writing the acceptance criteria.
For example, if you acceptance criteria is “purchase a blue bridesmaid dress” and I decided that I didn’t want the bridesmaids to wear blue anymore after I had picked my dress, the acceptance criteria would no longer be valid. I added stories to the backlog that had these dependencies on one another, and began to pull the first few stories into a sprint, because you just have to jump in and start somewhere.
A lot of the upfront tasks for the stories were done by myself and the groom, then as we progressed through the sprints we brought in team members to help assist because with more help we could spend more time on some of the crucial decisions we needed to make, which meant putting a lot of trust in my family members.
Sprinting
Creating a culture is key
We really wanted to have a venue that would hold at least two-hundred friends and family members to our wedding, seeing how most of our family and friends were in MA/NH — we decided that it was going to be in New Hampshire.
We then began researching different reception venues in the area and narrowed down our searches, but we quickly had to adapt when we found out some of the venues were already booked, some didn’t accommodate the number of people we were looking to invite and some were just too far away from the ceremony venue.
Living in NYC it is especially hard to be able to go visit these places in person, and they were starting to book fast, especially when you are planning a summer wedding and you live so far away. So we quickly pivoted and realized we can see these venues remotely.
We had to put trust into our team to be able to make this work.
So my parents offered to go visit every venue and facetime us while they were there so we could see the venue, ask questions to the venue coordinator and be able to make an informed decision with the help of our team.
It’s a lot like my current work environment — a lot of the teams I work on are remote, in different time zones, so you really have to work together and support each other to get your work done and stories completed.
Creating a culture where your team is trustworthy and honest is key to having a successful agile team, especially when working in a remote environment.
Start Somewhere, Iterate Early and Often
My 9 family members and myself, got to Klienfelds and were ready to find the perfect dress. I hate to break it to you, but there’s no such thing as a perfect dress. I shared some ideas with my assistant about what type of dress I was looking for, and what I envisioned was the perfect dress, and she began to bring out some dresses, based on what I described as my perfect dress.
I tried three dresses on, and hated each and every one of them — I was thinking to myself, great this isn’t going well and my family is sitting out there waiting for me to show them something. After the third dress, I decided well let’s just start here, and show them something, even though I wasn’t thrilled with it — I just needed to start somewhere and see where that would take me.
My family quickly started shouting out their thoughts and comments — “ I don’t like this, how about you try on something more like that”. So I took their feedback, and my own, and went back and tried on some more dresses. Showing different concepts early and often. This is what really helped to figure out what I wanted.
Eventually, my mom ended up suggesting a dress that wasn’t even close to the perfect dress that I described earlier to my assistant. So I said — sure why not, I’ll just do this to make my mom happy.
When I tried the dress on, it was definitely different than I imagined, but it made me feel like a bride — I knew that it was the right dress for me. But I never would have tried it on if I didn’t start somewhere and get feedback and adapt to the current situation.
Has it worked?
I mean, wedding planning can never be stressfree — but its made it a lot less stressful! Having specific deadlines and time frames that are apparent to everyone on the team makes everything a lot easier. The team can be super organized and help stay on task. We touch base frequently and give each other updates on where we are on the tasks we are working on. Over the next few months, using agile is going to be essential to help create efficiencies as we start working on the website, save the date/invitations and finalizing the guest list.
So as I conclude, I hope that everyone reflects on the idea that agile doesn’t have to be something you just do at work, you can apply it to several other activities and projects you are working on.
I hope that if you take anything away from this blog post, it should be that you need to start somewhere because continuous improvement is your friend — dealing with change is inevitable, and you have to learn to respond to the unexpected. So remember to be proud, but never satisfied.
Share your thoughts below! Have you thought about planning an agile wedding?
