Transcription
I'm going to do something a little bit different today. I've been working with my team on how we improve and move through our internal projects, specifically how we achieve our goals. So, we have our objectives at the high level, we have our key results, and we have all the tasks that need to be completed to achieve that goal. I'm going to show you what that looks like in a scrum environment.
Now, I will preface this by saying that we're not doing the traditional scrum. We're not running the traditional ceremonies, we do not have a scrum master, and we're not using points or stories. We are using estimated time inside of Asana. What I'm doing is giving you a take on a light version of scrum, and we're doing it the Surface way.
If this is your first time here and you have no idea who I am, my name is Marquee Murray. I am the CEO of Surface. We are a proud Asana partner, and I make videos like this every single week to help you get the most out of your Asana instance.
Now, I'm going to show you something in a second. We're going to get into Miro, and I'm going to give you a high-level overview of what we're talking about today. Then, I'm going to switch back to Asana so you can see exactly what this looks like. If you are a dev team or a product team, this might not be the scrum video for you. This is for agencies, this is for consultancies, and this is for teams that want to achieve better results, assess workload, and capacity within their teams. This is the video for you.
All right, so I'm going to show you our modified take on what scrum can look like inside of Asana. Let's get into the demo.
First, I'm going to show you around Miro to give you a high-level understanding of what we're actually looking at today. So, I've got a quick little wireframe here so you can see what we're going to be looking at. Then, we'll jump over to Asana.
Within the Asana goals module, we're going to have our objective. This is our top-level company goal, our objective of what we want to achieve within the desired time frame. Next, we have our different sub-goals, which in this case will be all of our key results. Every objective will have multiple key results or sub-goals.
Next, we've done a measure of effort or a metric. We've used the automatic method by tracking our goal success here, and we're tying that to a project. Each key result is tied to a project. I'll show you what that looks like in a second. Within that project, we'll have a list of tasks.
In this case, we have our key result one, and then for Q3, that's where we're starting. We have key result one, a backlog of tasks. This project is simply a backlog, and each key result will have one. That means each key result owner will have a project associated with that key result.
Within that backlog project, we're going to have our different list of tasks here. For this example, I have eight tasks, but as you can see, these are Q3 key result one tied to the project: task one, task two, task three, four, five, all the way through to eight.
What's important to note is that within the Asana project backlog, these tasks will stay here until it's time to sprint them. Each week, we'll ask the individual to look through their list of tasks and assess what they feel they can complete in the next sprint cycle. They'll move those tasks into our master sprint board.
So, let's go there. Again, we're going to take these two tasks as an example: task one and task two. We're going to select these tasks, and we're going to multi-home them to our master sprint board.
Here is our Asana master sprint board. We're running sprints in two-week cycles. I know some teams will run in two-week cycles. We have the first week as the actual sprint, and then the second week is more or less the overflow to take care of tasks that didn't get completed in that sprint.
Don't come at me in the comments; I know this is not standard practice. We want to have one-week sprints, we want to assess the work, and we want to get it done within that time frame. Anything that isn't accomplished either gets moved to the next sprint or gets reevaluated.
Again, we're giving ourselves two weeks because we're looking at achieving our goals here, and we don't want to rush things. We want things to be quality, so we're giving our team enough time. We have to consider that with our team, we're delivering to customers, right? Our customers will come first, so at least this two-week cycle gives us some flexibility to work within those projects.
Here we have the tasks assigned, given due dates, and given estimated time. They then move into "in progress" when they are ready. We'll take our various tasks; in this case, we'll have one in "to-do." We've assigned it, we've given a due date within the next two weeks, and we've given it an estimated time. We're moving it through "in progress" for review if needed. If it's blocked, we have an automation in Asana. I'll show you in a second what that looks like and how our scrum master, or in this case, our COO, will intervene.
Then, we'll get them through "done." Once they're done, each team member will have a retrospective card or task within the master sprint board. Within that, we have subtasks that get them to answer the questions: what went well, what didn't go well, and what were the lessons learned? These will all be subtasks.
I've assigned the two-week sprints for the remainder of the year, so we've got six months left, two quarters. We've got 13 of these subtasks with defined dates that will bring us all the way until the end of the year. If you're starting on January 1, you're going to have 26 of these, and I'll show you what that looks like inside of Asana.
Once the retrospective is done, I will say this is another modification: we're not having daily standups, okay? Because nobody needs more meetings. We are doing virtual retrospectives where every team member is just required at the end of the sprint cycle to not only do their retro and update their subtask but also plan for the next sprint.
We're cutting back on meetings to focus on remote teams and helping them be more efficient and not get bogged down. This is just another way we're trying to eliminate burnout by not adding more to people's plates.
Once we're done with the retrospective, we start the whole cycle over again. We go back to our backlog and pull the next set of tasks that we feel we can accomplish in this next sprint cycle.
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All right, so now let's go into Asana and see what this looks like in real time. I'm going to start at the top here. We have our company goals. Again, we've got all of our objectives here, and we click in. We run on EOS, so I'm using OKRs for the purpose of this video, but we typically would have our goals and then our rocks. You're going to see Q3 R; that's Q3 Rock in this case, but just imagine it's a key result.
I'm going to go in again. We've got our objective up top; that was the first block that I showed you. Let's just zoom out again; that's right over here. Then, we've got our various key results here. These are our sub-goals.
Let's go back; those are all right there. Within this, we're going to have a project. Again, we have the automatic measure here to update the progress, and it's based on connected projects. Rather than having multiple projects, we've chosen just one project.
Let's just go back; that's this project right here. See, we're moving through the stages, and I'm going to click into this here and go to our backlog. Now, here, let's just add in some more tasks. We've got task one, two, three, four, and I had eight in my example, so let's just add two more. There we go.
Again, this is the stage we're at right now. These are all of our key result tasks. Here they are. What we'll do now is I'll come in and say, "Okay, great, I'm going to take these two tasks, and I'm going to sprint these two."
First off, I'm going to assign them to myself. Okay, and then I'm going to multi-home them to our master sprint board. There it is, and I'm going to go over to our master sprint board. We're going to see our tasks come in; they go into the "to-do" section. All right, they're ready for me to start sprinting.
I'm going to take this first one, task one, based on the definition of done that I've assigned in the goals module. I'm going to say, "Okay, this is going to take me three hours," like so, and I'm going to get this done. Again, we're giving ourselves two weeks, so I'm going to get this one done by Wednesday.
Then, I'm going to set a priority; this one's high priority, so I want to make sure I get to it first. This is going to be in the sprint cycle; imagine we're starting July 1. Again, these are 13 sprint cycles we have for the rest of the year. There we go; it's going into sprint one, and we're going to move it into "in progress."
Number two here, this one is going to get done not this week but the week after. I'm going to give myself until the 9th. The estimated time is going to take 10 hours, maybe, and then the priority is going to be medium for this one, and it's going to go in the same sprint cycle. Again, going in progress.
Cool, so now we've got our tasks in. Again, every team member will have their own version of this. This is just a template we're using. I even added in a little SOP on how to use this project with all the steps and resources that they need, just so that they feel well-equipped.
Pause to read if you want, but each team member, based on the key results that they're responsible for, will have their own project just like this, okay, with one simple section.
Let's go back to our master sprint board, and now we will close this up like so. All right, so we're going to move these through for review if needed. When we go to the blocked section, here's what I've done.
First off, it changes it to blocked, as you can see. It adds a subtask. I'll do the same with this one because I want you to see what happens. It goes from medium priority to high priority as well. Okay, so it's going to switch over. There we go, and now it's blocked.
Now, it's created a subtask, and I'll show you what this subtask looks like in our rules, like so. There we go. With this here, when a task is moved to the section blocked, we're going to set the scrum stage to blocked, okay? We're going to set the priority to high, and then we've created a subtask that assigns it to our COO here.
It says, "Assess blocked task and create an action plan." Within this, if, "Hey Kate, this task is blocked and at risk of not being completed in this sprint, please connect with the rule trigger." In this case, it's me; I moved the card to block, so I'm the rule trigger. That will come up as who Kate needs to connect with, but if it was another team member, their name would show up here.
We're using variables. If you're not sure how variables work, you simply come into the rule, you're going to click on this plus here, click on variable, and then I went to people and rule trigger, or you could do task creator. But in this case, I clicked the default for display URL name or add mention that person. So, that's how we did that there. Great, now we save this, and you know what that looks like now.
So again, let's go into this task or subtask and see what it looks like. Great, there's Marquee, the rule trigger. Once we move it to done, obviously, we are done. All right, and so it's going to complete that task. I could have added an automation that said, "Hey, congratulations," maybe I will, "Congratulations! You completed another task; we're one closer to achieving our goals," right? Have some kind of little celebration. It's something we'll probably add in here.
At the end of that cycle, here's our retrospective. Now we have a card for every individual, so I'm going to go into my own, and it says, "Copy and paste the following template into the subtask below." So, I'm going to do what it says, and I got to remember to add a period there.
So, let's copy this. There we go. I'm going to go into one of my 13 sprint cycles here. Again, we're starting at Q3. If you're starting January 1, you'll obviously have 26 of them here, but we'll go in here, and these can be assigned every two weeks as well to you so you don't forget.
There we go. What went well? What didn't go well? A few things, and then what lessons learned can be applied to future sprints? Lots of lessons, like so. Then it says here, "Just be sure to document your lessons learned either in the relevant SOP or wherever you put your lessons learned." I'm not going to show you that in this video, and then we're all done for this sprint cycle.
Guess what I'm going to do next? I'm going to go into my planning for the next sprint. That's when I'll go back to my backlog here. Great, we've completed this task; this one should have been completed as well. Let's just move that to done. There you go; we've completed task one and task two.
Now it's time to do the whole thing over again. I'm going to address these next two tasks in my second sprint cycle, so I'm going to add them in again here in case you missed it, just like so. All right, let's go in, and we're going to put this into the next sprint cycle.
Okay, so that's all we're doing here, and then we're starting the whole thing over again, putting in our estimated time, and we're moving it through. This was just a really quick example of what this can look like. Again, this is modified; think of your own use case when you're looking at this.
If you liked this video, subscribe to the channel, like the video, and share it with someone. I get these questions so often about what scrum looks like, and if you're looking for traditional scrum, I've got multiple videos on that topic. Just go check out those videos if you want to know what traditional scrum looks like in Asana.
This is a modified version, so I hope you liked it. Thanks for watching. Leave a comment, ask a question, and as always, thank you. We'll see you in the next video. Bye for now. [Music]