In our corporate life, we are Scrum practitioners every day.

But are we Scrum practitioners outside the office and outside the working hours?

I say we are.

Let’s the consider the vacation (as a product) a very good candidate for practising Scrum outside the office.

What we need to implement this product?

The following might just be enough:

• Vacation team Scrum team -> Discuss who is part of the team and who owns each role
• Vacation vision product vision -> Decide what we want to do in the vacation: go to a sea destination, admire landscapes, go hiking, visit museums, visit historic buildings, pick a crowded/less crowded destination
• Vacation strategy product strategy -> Decide how we travel, where we want to stay (in a hotel or a rented apartment/rented house, tent, camping place)
• Vacation roadmap product roadmap -> Decide which are the main pieces of work we will cover in the available time interval: Traveling epic, Accommodation epic, Daily activities epic
• Vacation backlog product backlog -> Create the corresponding backlog items for travel arrangement, accommodation, daily activities
• Vacation refinement #backlogrefinement -> Discuss all user story and add the details for each one of them, add „acceptance criteria”, clear all open questions
• Vacation planning sprint planning -> Decide which of the above backlog items can be covered in a sprint, define sprint goal and get the team commitment
• Vacation sprint -> Start working on each backlog item in the sprint and complete them
• Vacation review sprint review -> Discuss what was realised versus what was planned, have a technical demo for the stakeholders and see which are the backlog items for the next sprints
• Vacation retrospective sprint retrospective -> Gather feedback from all Scrum team members, discuss the team morale, detail the good things but also the not so good things, decide on the lessons learned

It looks like the road to a successful vacation (product) is simple enough to follow.

Yet we see it day by day that organisations face a lot of difficulties in adopting and practising Scrum and as consequence teams morale suffers, employees feel disengaged and on the long term organisations and products fail.

In my experience the rate of successfully practicing Scrum outside the office is far way higher than practicing Scrum in the office and there are many reasons for that (topic for a separate article maybe).

The Take-Away

Have you ever „built” a non-successful vacation (product)?