KANBAN Board: Wang Man’s Kids Use it to Organize Themseles After School

Description

Wang Man is a KANBAN enthusiast and regularly transforms her home into SCRUMtopia. This is strongly motivated by the need of being super organized and, more importantly, having self-organized kids in order to juggle a business, a family, friends, time at the gym, and other interests.

Her two daughters have a KANBAN board to help them with the things they have to do when they come home from school and kindergarten.

What do you need?

You do not need much. Paper, stickers, pens, a location where you can stick everything on the wall.

1.List all things that need to be done from the moment you are entering the door at home. As always with agile, communication is key. If parents write household chores on stickers and kids have to execute, this is not agile. It is maybe pseudo-agile. (We see this a lot in the corporate context. You can do better than this 😉) It is important that you start with a broader idea, let’s say “We want to have dinner together and after that play or watch a movie three times a week. This is only possible if we free up mum’s time by doing things like clearing our snack box ourselves”. Based on this, kids can define tasks they will do to make this happen. They either write or draw to-dos.

2. Draw a Kanban board with three sections: To Do, Doing and Done

3. Paste the necessary to-dos on the Kanban board (in a sensible sequence)

4. Take 5 minutes before kids go to bed and adjust the to-dos according to the results and plan for tomorrow (review)

What makes this an agile parenting tool?

1.The Kanban board is the most widely used SCRUM tool.

2. It reflects key aspects of agile like transparency, responsibility and getting-stuff-done.

3. It is great to develop the sense of ownership in children (and adults alike).

Start today: Where do you want to see change in your family’s every day life? Please share with us in the comments section where the Kanban board could help to make family life better.