Your Agile Home

Brandi Olson is the founder and chief change artist at The Olson Group . With expertise in teaching, organizational learning and change, and human-centered design, Brandi is an experienced organizational designer and strategic partner with 10+ years of experience applying and teaching agile practices with teams and leaders. Brandi has a Masters of Education from the University of Minnesota and is a trained Human-Centered Design facilitator, Agile coach and Certified Scrum Professional with the Scrum Alliance. Brandi has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and is a sought after speaker at leadership conferences all over the country.

In this episode, the two moms sit down and talk about how they run an Agile Home and what exactly the differences are in Scrum vs. Kanban. We also learn about how both make the mental and emotional work visible to the entire family. 

The core of agile is really just the values and principles about how we get work done and how we work together. Then the practices and the tools that we use get tailored to the particular problems in terms of our lives or home or school or something totally different.

Overwhelm, too much work and things fly in lots of different directions can really give working parents with young kids that feeling of just, "Oh my gosh, I just don't know how to keep everything all together."   Things come up and you can't plan everything perfectly. To be able to have a system in place in a rhythm that allows you to respond to what comes up without having that throw your entire world upside down is really important. Especially when the margins are thin. As a working parent with young kids, there's not a lot of slack in life these days. And so being able to respond to the inevitable disruptions, changes, emergencies that come up is really important.    Which have you tried in your home life - Kanban or Scrum? Let us know in the Facebook Group!

Kanban was actually a system created by Toyota. Its flexibility allows you to overlay other workflows. There are 4 principles of kanban.

Principle 1: Start with what to do now. 

Principle 2: Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change. Changes that improve the system.

Principle 3: Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities & titles.

Principle 4: Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

It is like scrum but it doesn't have deadlines. Next week on the podcast, we are going to speak to a mom who uses kanban. 

If you have any questions about which system - scrum or kanban - is right for you, book a call with me at yvonnemarcus.com

Be sure to join us in the Facebook Group!

We've talked about Agile on this podcast a lot. Agile is a project management system that helps you get your ish done. There are different ways to Agile, and my favorite is scrum.

Scrum is an agile process allowing you to focus on delivering results in the shortest period of time. It's rapid and repeatedly checking systems and goals. 

If you're a family that has to keep things changing often, scrum is the way to go. You get regular feedback, the entire family addresses the problems together and everyone gets to do the work that they enjoy doing more.

If you have any questions, book a call with me at yvonnemarcus.com

Be sure to join us in the Facebook Group!

Finding this aspect of your child's personality will be a game changer because finding your child's reward center means you can get them to do thing that they don't necessarily want to do.

Knowing a child's love language (Click here to find out more info), can be easy. It's the thing they ask for the most. People feel more loved when they receive love in their love language. But we often give love in the same way that we like to receive it.

Email me or comment and let me know what your child's reward center is and what do you use it for?

Join me in the Facebook Group!

Video games are on our nightly routine. Every night we get together and play games. 

Some of our favorites for our son include Mario Odyssey, Mario Tennis, free-build in Minecraft and a few more!

The reason we do this together is because it can be so collaborative and feel like a team effort. We used to do this when I was a kid.

 

If your kids are into video games and you haven't checked them out, I encourage you to check them out and try to get immersed, too. 

Tell me your favorite video games on Instagram or in the Facebook Group!

Agile is meant to add flexibility to your life. It isn't about changing absolutely everything, but to make little tweaks. 

My kids are now in school for 5 days a week. That's 5 days of lunches, snacks, extra clothes, things they need. The nice thing about having a system is that it doesn't change drastically. 

This is a prime example of how you agile. You try something (like lunches). You introduce it. You go through a certain amount of time trying it. If it isn't working, then at the end, you discuss what is not working and then adjust. This is called a feedback loop.

Because you are agile, accepting changes and tweaks becomes easy.

Think of all of the places where you are making it more difficult for yourself and how you can readjust!

Tell me how it goes on Instagram or in the Facebook Group!

 

If you're looking t Agile your holiday season, join me for my 31 day challenge happening now! 

The holiday season can be a very stressful time. We need to know what could really makes the holidays a great season for you.

How do you deal with holiday timelines and traditions?

List out what all of yo.ur usual holiday events are. Think of how they serve your family's values and start prioritizing for each of the family members. 

How do you deal with your family? 

This is so hard because there can be a lot of problems with extended family. Have a plan with talking points to guide you.

How do you manage the time?

Think and plan everything out very early on. 

Join me for the 31 day challenge!

Tell me how it goes on Instagram or in the Facebook Group!

Losing your routine and stability can feel like a backslide. One day you just forget and then you don't get back into the flow. 

 Backslides can happen from one forgotten task or if someone, like the kids, refuse to stick to the routine.

The key is to help them find the motivation. You can either find their motivation center or find the root of the problem. 

The other way to fix a backslide is to just hop back on the horse! 

Look at a part of your routine that has slid away from you and figure out how you can fix it. 

Tell me how it goes on Instagram or in the Facebook Group!

Welcome to the How We Agile Series! We'll be talking about all of the ways that we Agile using Scrum, Khanban and more! 

Recently we moved and we agiled this massive task.

I started with a whiteboard with To Do, In Progress, and Done sections. We broke tasks up into 2 week blocks. I recommend using a moving timeline off of Google. Another top tip is to color code your boxes.

We broke the whole thing down into very small pieces, prioritized each piece and made sure we didn't pack anything we needed.

Do you have a big move coming up? Listen to this episode so you can Agile your move, too!

Don't forget to come hang out with me on Instagram or in the Facebook Group!