Personal Development Using Scrum
- “What if we train them, and they leave?”
- “What if we don’t… and they stay?”
At Blue Harvest we believe the greatest engineers are born from a passion for technology, high emotional intelligence, and a continual desire to explore, learn and be challenged. Growing and maintaining a world-class team means a strong focus on feeding, motivating and helping guide such desire for self-development.
We think an agile approach is something beneficial beyond software development and have created an agile Personal Development Program (PDP) based on scrum.
In this article I hope to share with you how and why our program works and what it draws from the traditional scrum events. This program itself is also the target of an agile continuous improvement process!
“Scrum PDP” Events
The Sprint
“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Mark Twain
The length of our PDP sprint is one quarter (3 months). This is about 12 Fridays. As consultants, we are naturally busy bringing deep engineering excellence to our clients on Monday to Thursday. However, every Friday, we devote our whole day to personal and company growth and have much fun as a team doing so! We try to intertwine the two — personal growth drives company growth drives personal growth.
Diverting 20% of our billable time to such individual development is a bold commitment to a vision of being the best by investing in people and continually growing in technical ability. We know that if we do not foster the talents of the best engineers they will eventually go elsewhere leaving a bottom-heavy pyramid of experience levels, which is not a sustainable model of excellence.
For the same reason, we put a high value on work-life balance and the (inter)personal happiness of every individual — it’s important to note we are not working counterproductive overtime to make up the slack. We know the value of maintaining a fun, creative, trusting environment. A happy engineer is a much more productive and quality one!
Sprint Planning
We use lightweight agile boards (e.g. Trello — free for small stuff like this) to organise our PDP backlogs and sprints. Light enough that we’re not fighting to enter three rough seedlings of ideas, smart enough that we have a good experience on any device and “do scrum” with ease.
Every employee has a mentor. Ultimately, anyone growing in rank can become a mentor to someone else — helping others grow can bring a new level of personal development to those that feel ready. The PDP is a private arrangement between mentor and mentee.
The mentor and mentee agree some personal development goals for the backlog. Of course, it is important that both the mentor and mentee provide input into suitable goals based on their wishes / observations. We hold the view that progress is made just outside our comfort zone, just enough stretch that it requires some growth.
These goals can be anything from technical achievements like gaining AWS certification, increasing your language arsenal with things like Go, Kotlin, TypeScript, Node.js or Python, transferring your Angular skills to React, or more personal like article writing, making videos, improving coaching skills, emotional intelligence, human languages, etc. Individual improvement drives our company improvement!
We advise this scrum approach, but we trust them with the freedom to determine what works best for them; effectiveness is not always achieved by adherence to rigid process.
The Daily Scrum
The daily scrum need not be a formal occasion as the whole process is time-stretched and one-on-one. As described in scrum, it’s basically a collaborative planning session and an opportunity to deal with impediments early. Perhaps a directed chat over coffee about how things are going. Perhaps just to listen. Perhaps to pass on some observations. It’s also a good place to discuss seeds of possible future ideas and add them to the backlog for later refinement.
When dealing with personal development, impediments are sometimes not technical, work-related or easy to understand on a superficial level. An emotionally intelligent approach is essential to be effective here. A pure intention to listen, understand, and hopefully help the individual to their own solutions is much more useful than negative, preachy, or do-as-I-say feedback. To effectively help others we must first strive to put our ego, personal biases and interests aside. There is no room for “rock stars” in effective teamwork and development.
Story Refinement
“The first principle of success is desire — knowing what you want. Desire is the planting of your seed.”
— Robert Collier
As in scrum, this is an opportunity to flesh out the seeds by adding detail and some priority to the items in the Personal Development Backlog.
We don’t focus on velocity (of course everyone knows Value is more important than Velocity in scrum, right?), thus typical scrum story point estimation is less useful here (but feel free to make this process your own!).
It may make sense to discuss here if the original sense of the size of the PDBI (Personal Development Backlog Item) was realistic and adjust number of items tackled per sprint accordingly.
Sprint Review
Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.
— Joel A. Barker
The sprint review is, as always, the natural end to the sprint. It should not be a significant distraction or detour from regular activities; no more than an hour’s preparation should be required.
The point of any review is to show the results of your actions. Little explanation should thus be necessary. Most importantly — remember to have fun and celebrate your achievements! If you take only one thing from this article, let it be this — lack of celebration will lead to a feeling of emptiness that will result in less focus and decreased performance over time.
Sprint Retrospective
The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.
— Helmut Schmidt
Of course, the essence of any agile process is a continual inspection, adaption and improvement in a transparent way. This is handled in the PDP retrospective.
Here it is recommended to brainstorm in an honest and open way on improvements to the PDP process (between mentor and mentee) and then together select one or two items to work on in the next sprint.
This way, over the mid- to long-term, the process should tend toward optimal delivery of “value” for the participants. When trust and team spirit build in the process, everyone should ultimately end up with a highly effective personal development coach with their own programme tailored to them.
Conclusion
He who fails to plan, plans to fail.
— Winston Churchill
An organisation that proactively supports personal development can be very inspiring and motivating for its employees. Whether it is in a company, or just for yourself, it is important to keep growing. Scrum is only one way to structure and support the continual progress of a personal development plan, what’s yours?
I hope this inspires you to think about how you might develop your own personal development plan. Perhaps you have ideas or examples already; please share!
