Part 1: Motivation and the context of wedding planning

In 2016 my wife and I married. In order to support the planning of the wedding, I introduced Scrum. In this blog, I will share our experience of this experiment.

This is the first out of 5 parts. In this part I will explain my motivation for using Scrum. Furthermore, I will describe the special Scrum context of wedding planning.These are the other parts of this blog:

• Part 2: Roles
• Part 3: Artefacts
• Part 4: Events
• Part 5: The definition of “Done” and the conclusion

Introduction/Motivation

It may appear a bit nerdish to introduce a  “process framework that has been used to manage complex product development”[1] to organize a wedding. In fact, when my wife and I decided to marry we did not really have a clue what had to be considered to organize a wedding since this was the first wedding in which we were involved as bride and bridegroom. Furthermore, we did not have any knowledge of wedding planning at the beginning of organizing our wedding.

We heard from friends who had married recently that a lot of things had to be organized and that we should start planning at least one year before the wedding day. As one of our friends put it: “The wedding day was nice. However, it is also nice that the wedding is over now.”

At work, I got in contact with the agile approach of Scrum and gained some insights into it while preparing for my PSM I certification. Inspired by that knowledge, I got the idea of applying its principles to the absolutely different field of planning our wedding.

Apparently, organizing a wedding appears to be a very complex process in which certain dependencies have to be observed. In our case, 158 working items needed to be completed in order to finish the “shippable product”, our perfect wedding event.

By employing the Scrum approach to organize the wedding, I wanted to benefit from its pillars transparency, inspection and adaptation. I wanted to make sure that I was permanently in control of the organizing process by knowing what working items were pending, what dependencies had to be observed and what changes were necessary to ensure that our great day would be a perfect wedding.

Furthermore, I wanted to achieve an (almost) even distribution of the workload during the planning time. This required a good knowledge of the existing working items and the estimated time for completing them.

I was also curious to learn whether Scrum was universal enough to be applied to a context outside of agile software development (or even apart from product development).

In the following chapters I will demonstrate how my wife and I adapted Scrum to support the planning. I will describe how and why we adjusted its events, roles and artefacts to our needs.

I assume that the reader is a bit familiar with the Scrum framework. If not, The Scrum Guide[1] is a helpful introduction. However, whenever I point out differences between original Scrum and our adapted approach I will explain both variants and the motivation for the adaptation.

The wedding planning context

Difference between product development and wedding planning

There are major differences between a normal product development context and wedding planning.

The first difference is the number of people involved in the process. The Scrum Team consists of one Scrum Master, one Product Owner and usually three to nine Development Team members. However, in the wedding planning context there are only the bride and the bridegroom (and maybe sometimes a wedding planner in order to delegate planning complexity).

The second difference is that Scrum is usually used for organizing the full working time of the Development Team members as effectively as possible. In the wedding planning context, just the part of the free time required for wedding planning is organized and there usually is a buffer of unplanned time. In fact, one motivation of introducing Scrum was to distribute the workload of the time for planning as evenly as possible amongst the sprints. I would have probably ended up in a mental home if I had had to spend my entire free time on wedding planning for months.

Finally, the duration of the Scrum process differs between software or product development and wedding planning. If Scrum is employed for software or product development it is a continuous process in which the Product Backlog is permanently changed because working items are added, removed, re-prioritized, etc.

For wedding planning, the Scrum process terminates on the wedding day. Therefore, the Product Backlog will reach a stable state at some point at which working items are only marked as done (hopefully some time before the wedding day).

Training on the Scrum framework

My first task as Scrum Master was to provide some knowledge of Scrum to my wife who was not familiar with that framework. Instead of providing every detail of Scrum, explaining the principles, roles, artefacts and events, I decided to practice a native approach similar to parents teaching their children to talk.

I “lived” the Scrum process and guided my wife to follow the lead. Therefore, she intuitively learned to practice Scrum without being bothered by the theoretical background.