About Those Big Goals

In Scrum for Your Life, goals that cannot be accomplished in a single sprint are called Epics. We may have several these in our master backlog, like opening a business, running a marathon or losing a large amount of weight.

Any significant accomplishment is going to take more than a few weeks, and even planning may be a task assigned to a single sprint. If you’ve never run a marathon before, then coming up with an approach to succeed might even take some research and talking with others. And once you have the plan, you will begin toward your goal by running short distances, even walking part of the way, until you’ve built up some endurance and can gradually increase how long you can run.

Your sprint might include something like “follow training plan” with a goal of being able to run 10 miles by the end of the sprint. A business startup would include key things like defining offerings and customers. And losing anything more than a few pounds would call for something reasonable and attainable in four weeks, such as losing three to five pounds.

The benefit of using Scrum for Your Life is that at the end of the Sprint, although you may not have achieved you biggest goal, you have succeeded at a portion of it. Reflecting on this in your Retrospective gives you as sense of accomplishment and builds confidence for you to go forward with the next Sprint. Repeat this over and over again and eventually you will realize that there is almost no limit to what you can achieve.