It was kinda good feeling to kick off the weekend with a clean slate (board). We are a family of three and my husband/birthday boy would be working the whole weekend. It would be down to me and my 7 year old boy to work the list. We had a birthday party to plan, house to clean and all kind of other unrelated tasks.

First we wrote down all the tasks we needed to complete. We tried to make the tasks as small as possible and instead of just folding laundry we made one for folding socks so both of us could participate and work together.

The ‘funny’ thing about list of tasks it grew during the weekend. We started off with 16 tasks. Then it was 19 and ended in 25. We had to constantly prioritized, there was the birthday party on Saturday so it made sense to have tasks related to that as a first priority.

The best thing about the list of tasks though, the issues constantly moved over to the ‘done’ column, which is an awesome psychological boozt. I found it really helpful to have all the tasks in one place, even put an appointment in there as well. We did not complete all the tasks but we did manage 20 which was better than the 16 on the original list. We decided not to do 2 tasks (bought icecream for dessert instead of baking a cake and decided one bookmarket was all we needed). The 3 tasks we didn´t complete were the ones lowest on the list of priority, something we could easily do next weekend.

The prize for us was actually on the list of tasks as well. Going wild on the bookmarket

We’ve been aiming for issues with our children that needs to improve, like brushing their teeth in the morning, studying, remember to go to the football practice, go walking with our dog, put dishes in the dishwasher and it really help having Scramban. Scramban table is visual on the kitchen wall so we look at it often every day and it’s a little competition between family members  

One Friday night we decided to clean the house together and get pizza and icecream for awards afterwards. I had never cleaned the house so quickly before. It was done within 60 minutes for around 200 square meters. We are five in the family, but my oldest (19 years) one was not home so we were 4 that participated. And this went incredibly well. They felt great to get the prize immediately and everyone was happy to go into the weekend in a clean house

I will definitely do this again with them

First day over and planning for next day underway

Man down
Mom went abroad so we were one man down for three days. We still managed to pull it off (a lot of brushing teeth, folding laundry and other fun activities
Looking back I’m so happy I started this just when she went away…else the apartment would be a total wreck…the kids really did pull through and help “keeping up appearances” so now I have some time late on Sunday evening to blog about this rather that being tied up with cleaning

Many icons
There were a lot of different types of tasks they could complete. The most used was brushing their teeth…not everybody brushes twice daily so better use this for some simple tasks and encourage them to brush more often =)
The board become a little crowded soon and we needed to do some reprints of the icons, but that was okay…everybody was doing their part and even the 4 year old took out the trash with help from his sisters…he didn’t quite understand why he couldn’t move the extra ice-cream ticket up to his row

Retro
Being an Agile geek I had to do a Retrospective on the first run. I started out with my favorite retro with the Learning Matrix. I didn’t plan on having them write or do anything, just say what the liked, disliked and ideas…but as soon as I had put up the four post it tickets they started moving icons on the board they liked to the green (happy face).

I was a little surprised and enlightened. They where happy with the rewards (no surprise there and even with the laundry folding and putting the cloths into the closets. There were two tickets that they were not happy with but had very good reasons:

• Swing (play outside) – since is was never used…the wether has been rather bad all week with the exception of excellent wether on Friday morning for the solar Eclipse
• Happy face (schoolbag in order) – the complaint was just that the icon should be a schoolbag.

So we were pretty pleased and there always fun around these people:

Final thoughts
It was a lot of work but everybody chipped in and we had fun with the rewards too:

• Icecream (in a snow blizzard)
• Ipods whiped and set up for the 3 eldest
• Mamma Mia school play what we saw today (3 eldest again….the youngest wen’t to his grandparents and didn’t want to go back home from there so he got something he wanted too

Everybody was ready to take another “run” on next week and the rewards have already been planned…so I guess the story continues next week =)

During Betware’s Heavy Mental day 2015 we had an idea for a Family board based on Scrum & Kanban.

The board got the name “Scramban” a strange mix of Scrum & Kanban that has a “fun” likeness to an Icelandic word =)

This website was up & running within 24h and the plan is to add content here as we test this out and hopefully bring others with us on this journey =)