Using Agile Scrum in the Home for ADHD

A couple of months ago, I shared two articles on LinkedIn that showcased one couple's use of Scrum to help organize their home. What attracted me to the articles was that the husband in this case, Francis, is diagnosed with ADHD. Together, he and his wife, Sally, employed Scrum to organize their lives. If you really know or live with someone who has severe to moderate ADHD, you know full-well the challenges those people face every day. Their families also face significant challenges.

This is where I identify with the couple: ADHD is prominent in my family. And in the wake of reading their story, I started looking for opportunities to try it in my home. This article is about our first experience.

Living with ADHD
If your family has children in school who regularly complete all of their homework every night, who never have to pull all-nighters because they suddenly remember a major project DUE TOMORROW, and enjoy the intellectual challenge of seven classes a day, congratulations. Your life is probably calm and steady. Or at least calmer and steadier than mine. For us, spontaneity is the Rule of the Day. There is always an unforeseen priority to address.

You may even look upon families like mine with envy ("They are always so active") or pity ("I can't imagine what it must be like to live in that chaos"). Your judgement is your own. In our house, we have learned to place support ahead of judgement. Scaffolding above scorn. We work with the activity and embrace the creativity.

We have tried numerous ways to help the kids stay organized in school. But until I read the story of Francis and Sally, it never occurred to me to use Agile SDLC practices as a tool to teach my kids how to manage their lives. Fortunately we had the perfect opportunity: DEVOtional 2019.

DEVOtional is an annual fan gathering of the music group DEVO in Cleveland, Ohio. This year it was on July 26 and 27 at the Beachland Tavern and Ballroom. Members of the band make guest appearances, there's memorabilia, and two days of DEVO-inspired music performed by bands from all corners of the US (Though you will not hear their most popular tune "Whip It"). And this year, my 17-year old's band was invited to open the Saturday festivities. He had a lot of prep work to do.

Our first attempt of making a plan was to document all the steps needed using Google Sheets. I sat with him and listed all of the tasks. We had multiple tabs for each topic; set list, equipment, costumes, performance requirements, and a trip itinerary. We agreed on everything that needed to be done and I set him on his way.

The Google Sheet went untouched for a month.

Enter Scrum
It was about this time that I read the Scrum for ADHD articles and realized that the best tool for the job was the one I use at work. So after talking about it with my wife, we created our first family Scrum Board.

DEVOtional 2019 Scrum Board: Week 1

Scrum can be an ideal tool for people with ADHD for several reasons:

• Occupy the Field of View. Those with ADHD have difficulty blocking out distractions--auditory, visual, smell--and creating a physical board can occupy the field of vision and help reduce visual noise
• Sensory Satisfaction. Creating stories with sticky notes and moving them across the board is a satisfying feeling, like moving game pieces across a board game
• Celebrate Success. ADHD sufferers learn to live with frustration in school environments because they process information differently--getting stories squarely in the Complete column equals accomplishment and a great way to boost someone's dopamine levels

Taking a purist approach for this project would have led to disaster; we needed to work within our environment (Recognize the Culture), with our family members (Understand Your Resources), to achieve a finished product--(Minimum Viable Product) which was getting my son's band on-stage with all of their equipment, music, and visuals at 2:30 pm (EDT) at the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland. I've been in plenty of Agile work environments and each is always a little different, by necessity. And since this was our first attempt, and we wanted to make it a positive experience for my son.

In getting started, we agreed to some basic parameters:

• The Scrum Board would be time-boxed up until we boarded the plane from Seattle to Cleveland--this meant 4 weeks in which to work (4 weeks = 4 rows)
• Work would be organized in one-week sprints
• User Stories would fit onto stickies and would contain a simple task, person accountable, and estimated level of effort (Small, Medium, or Large)
• The stories would be tracked across these stages: To-do, Doing, Verify, and Complete
• We would have (near) daily Scrum Meetings to review progress, identify blockers, and celebrate successes
• No stickies would progress through stages without everyone being present
• We would conduct weekly retrospectives to evaluate progress

A word about User Story Points: we decided to forego points for this introduction to Scrum and opted for t-shirt sizes for the Levels of Effort. After all, my son already had a full-time job as a high school student. By keeping the estimating measures simple, we guaranteed his buy-in. So we agreed to the following:

• Small: Story could be tackled in an afternoon
• Medium: Story would require more than one afternoon, and maybe two days to complete
• Large: Stories that would take more than two days to complete

Our first Scrum Planning session generated nearly 30 stories--two of which were complete before we started (Celebrate success!).

The tactile nature of managing the project really engaged the family--we liked having the stand-ups and moving the stickies across stages. By the start of Week #2, our board looked like this:

As you can see, we still had five stories in Verify (Demonstration) and the same two stories in Complete. So all the stories were moved to the following week's To-do (Backlog) and Doing (In-progress) columns. And as we learned more details about stories, we started moving some to later weeks. We also added five stories.

With the start of Week #3, tensions started to rise. We had not completed a significant amount of stories and the date was drawing closer. And as with most projects, as we got deeper into it, more stories needed to be added to the plan. Key to keeping my son bought-in to this new approach was giving him small wins along the way. So we put some easy-to-achieve stories on the board, and those moved from To-do to Complete very quickly.

Still, we stuck with the methodology. At our weekly retrospective, we moved the backlog of stories down to Week #3 and started evaluating scope trade-offs. Some stories moved to Complete because we didn't have an archive.

There was one major cause of project churn, and it was our own little Epic. My son's vision for his costume on-stage was to wear a Spud Ring. This costume innovation was used by DEVO during their "Oh No, It's DEVO" album and tour. Spud Rings are formed white plastic shells that fit over the shoulders of the performers. They can be constructed by way of vacuum-forming.

Had we ever done this before? No. Did we have access to a suitable machine? No.

Enter "unreasonable project requirement #1."

We threw ourselves at this part of the project. My son was the Product Manager and I was the Scrum Master and Developer. He found a video online on how to build a vacuum-form machine and I set about acquiring the materials and building it while he was at school.

By the end of Week #3, we were really in a rhythm. Stories were being moved from Doing to Verify to Complete on a daily basis. More stories were added as we continued to make discoveries. The sense of success was palpable. We were going to get all of the work completed in time for our flight departure.

Hey, do you remember that vacuum-forming machine Epic I mentioned a little while ago?

Yeah that one. As it turns out, it's one thing to successfully construct a fully functioning vacuum-form machine. It's quite another to understand physical properties of plastic sheets, heating them at the appropriate temperature, and buying enough materials to allow for trial and error. The first two tests revealed all of this. Unfortunately, we we ran out of time and had to shelve this portion of the plan.

Still, we completed nearly all of our stories with one day to spare. Two stories were left on the board and we tackled them on the road.

So here we are, post-DEVOtional 2019. My son's performance was a hit with the organizers and the crowd and his band has been invited back to next year's event.

Now that we've experienced a positive experience using Scrum, We will be applying a version of it during the school year so he can stay on top of school work.

Wins all around.

The boys pose with Bob 1 from DEVO at DEVOtional 2019

Retrospective
Using Scrum to manage this effort proved to be the winning solution. We were all engaged in it, knew which stories we owned, and we could all see the progress day-to-day. In considering what we will do next time, and we will be doing a version of Scrum again for both of our sons this coming school year, we will need to incorporate management of all their classes. And we will be introducing them to story points.

I believe the experiences my son gained through this project will serve him well as he moves on from high school and into college and beyond. Project-based collaboration is the way business works today. Unfortunately, our schools are not yet rising to the challenge of teaching all of our kids how to be successful in these arenas. Lecture-and-listen, a 19th century approach to education, is still de rigueur. Add the increasing frequency of ADHD and ADD in our children, and our society has bigger problems than you might think.

Fortunately, we're going to give my son, and all our children, the tools needed to succeed. This is a surefire way for them to not just overcome a challenge, but to whip it. Whip it good.

Yeah, I went there.

By the way, if you're interested in reading the articles I mentioned at the start of this blog, you can find them here:

• Using Scrum to Help with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) - Part One
• Using Scrum to Help with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) - Part Two