AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I am thrilled that you are here so thank you so very much for tuning in.
Today we are talking about a project management system I use in my business called scrum. I’m going to tell you what scrum is, why it’s important, and why we use it inside my business. Specifically, I’m going to focus on smaller businesses using scrum, including mine, because I really don’t have a big team.
I’ve been in business for a while but I have one full-time employee, two part-time employees, and a handful of amazing contractors that help me with each of my big projects. We tend to go back to the same contractors again and again so they feel like they are part of my team but they are only part of my team during our big promotions.
I’m going to teach you how to use scrum if you have a really small team and you plan on using contractors to get the work done.
Before we get there, I want to tell you about where I am in my business and kind of what’s been going on. At the time of this recording we are right in the middle of a brand new promotion I put together all around the product Webinars That Convert.
Webinars That Convert is my brand new program, obviously you get what it’s all about, it’s all about building your business with webinars. If you follow my content you know that webinars are definitely my jam. I have been using webinars for many years and I really do believe that the combination of webinars and Facebook ads have built my multi-million dollar business.
I have no doubt those two pieces, especially when used together, have skyrocketed my success. So I finally put out a product that really shows you from A to Z how to create a webinar system, not just a one-off webinar, but a webinar system in your business.
I am extremely proud of this product because I know that it can get results if you really do the work. I have no doubt in my mind. It was a lot of fun to create it because there is so much that could go into a webinar system that could dramatically change how your audience interacts with you, how your audience responds to your offers. Of course, it will not only boost your email list but it will boost your customers as well. Webinars sell when you do them right.
I tell you that because we recently had 651 people sign up for Webinars That Convert in the last six days. Is that crazy or what! At least it feels very crazy in my head. I loved putting this product together so I am really proud of those numbers, especially since we aren’t even done promoting it yet. If you want to check out the product you can go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/WTC and you can learn about my new webinar program.
I wanted to talk about scrum because we used scrum throughout this entire process of the promo that I am currently in. We use it for all of my Profit Lab launches as well. One thing I do with each of my podcasts is give you a free giveaway.
Instead of creating a brand new free giveaway for this episode, I wanted to really focus back on one that I want you to grab if you haven’t already grabbed it. Many of you may already have it but in Episode #62 (How to Create a Project Plan for Your Next Promotion) I gave you my project plan.
I showed you every single thing that went into my last promotion, the Profit Lab promotion. That was a wildly successful launch as well and I literally gave you every action we do in order to promote the program and to offer the program once it has been promoted. Everything is in that project plan.
I thought that was still a really good giveaway for this episode because inside scrum we put the project plan in there and it is called The Backlog. We will get to that in a second. My backlog is my project plan and I thought it would be really helpful to you to see what my backlog looked like. And I have already created that.
In order to get it, just go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/62download and you can download my project plan instantly to see every single step I take inside a big promotion. If you already got it you are good to go and you are well on your way to scrumming your first project. Let’s talk about scrumming your first project.
Before we dive in I want to thank our sponsor today, 99Designs. I am such a huge fan of this company because they can take care of all of your needs. We are talking logos, social media cover images, website graphics, and so much more. So visit www. 99Designs.com/amy and get a $99 upgrade for free.
So let’s jump back to our podcast.
Let’s talk scrum. I was first introduced to the scrum system through the book, Scrum. I will warn you I personally feel it is a little bit of a heavy, dry read. There are a lot of examples from the military and from big software companies.
I just cannot relate to those examples because I have a really small business compared to any of those. I needed a little help getting through the book. I knew it was an important system I wanted to implement in my business but I just didn’t love the book.
What I did was get it on audio through Audible. In addition to that I had the physical book in front of me and listened while I followed along in the book. I got through the book really quickly by doing that.
I love a physical book because I can take notes and highlight. So, I used audio and the physical book to get through it quickly and I really retained so much more information that way.
Usually, if I get a book on audio I tend to multitask. I work out while I am listening to it or will do things around the house. But you just can’t do that with scrum. I needed to stay really focused; so, I used both and whipped through it. If you need a little help maybe you could try that tip because it really worked well for me.
I got through the book and then I started to apply it. Around that same time someone had given me a PDF handout that summarizes the book as well. That was also really valuable. I am going to link to that PDF so that you have all of the information you need.
I thought this episode would be really valuable to you, if you were interested in scrum, to see how it works but also how I apply it to a small business and some of the adaptations I needed to make in order to make scrum work really well inside a small team.
That’s the value I can bring even if you already read the book or if you are going to get the PDF or my show notes. You still want to pay attention here because I am going to give you some tips, tweaks, and tricks in order to help you implement it right away.
Here’s the deal, scrum is a method designed to add energy, focus, clarity, and transparency to project planning and implementation. The term, scrum is taken from rugby and it is a formation. scrum is a formation that a rugby team uses in order to restart the game.
Each team gets in this certain formation, a scrum, that restarts the game. I thought that was a really cool terminology for a project planning process as well. It is all about high-performing, cross-functional teams. That is what scrum is all about.
Why do I use scrum? I want to go over four key reasons scrum can work really well inside your business too. First, it increases your speed to completion. We are able to get through projects so much faster now that we use scrum.
It highlights performance and really pays attention to the work people are getting done and gives them the ownership on that performance. It also creates cross- functional teams. They are empowered to make decisions and I will show you why they are empowered to make decisions. But that is what scrum does.
It fosters consistent communication. This is probably my favorite part of scrum and I will tell you exactly how we use it during my promotions. But this constant communication allows us to make sure everything is working smoothly. When it’s not we fix it instantly. Communication, to me, is the most important thing inside scrum.
I have to adapt scrum to work with a really small team, obviously, most of us listening right now have really small teams and even smaller budgets. Hiring people is not always the answer. There is actually a scrum team so each time you start a new project you are going to have a scrum team.
The scrum team involves the product owner, the team, and the scrum master. The product owner takes the vision of the project and translates that into a product backlog. That is why I wanted to remind you to download my project plan from episode #62 because that is m y product backlog. So, http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/62download, will allow you to see exactly what my backlog looks like.
I see myself as the product owner. I have the vision for the entire project, and by project I am really talking about a big promotion or launch. I have the overall vision and I know what needs to go into it.
I usually start the backlog and throw everything I can think of into that backlog. We will talk about the backlog again in a moment. My team actually gets in there and helps me shape it as well.
That’s one adaptation that they don’t really talk about in the book–the team helping with the backlog. But, as a small team, my assistant will know things that I am going to forget. And, I have a full-time project manager now. She is definitely going to want to add to that backlog, but I see myself as the product owner.
The team develops the product or completes the project envisioned by the product owner. The team would likely be a lot of your contractors and then any of your employees that you have.
The third role, to me, is the most important role. That is the scrum master. The scrum master does whatever it takes to make the scrum team successful. They remove obstacles, facilitate meetings, and always act as a gatekeeper of the product backlog.
I have recently hired a full-time project manager. My project manager is the scrum master. I haven’t always had a full-time project manager. In the past I would hire somebody to act as my project manager just during launches. I did that for a good two years so just know that you don’t have to have a full-time project manager to act as a scrum master. You can bring someone on to take that role and after that they basically go and do other things. You then schedule to have them come back when you are going to do another launch.
In the past, I would pay a two-month project fee to have someone act as my scrum master. I have finally hired someone. But just know this is something you grow into.
I do not think you should be the scrum master. Most people listening to this episode have a small business and you are basically a one-man or one-woman show with a really small team. You might think you need to be the project owner and the scrum master. I want to caution you against that.
I would love to see you hire someone to be the scrum master during your next big promotion so that you do not have to be in the weeds with everything. That is how we get completely burned out. I was definitely getting burned out when I was trying to fill both of those roles in the past.
This last launch was the first time I have had a full-time project manager. I have had people on my team do it in the past, like Trivinia, who was an amazing scrum master for the Profit Lab. But she is my assistant so that meant we had to pull her off of a bunch of things and that creates a little bit of stress.
In the past I had hired someone to do it part-time for me during my promotions, as I mentioned. But this last time, with Webinars That Convert, I have had someone since the beginning when we started planning that promotion until right now where we are right in the middle of it. I have had a scrum master the entire time and it has taken so much stress off of me.
I don’t necessarily know what’s going on at every minute of the day with this launch and that is a beautiful thing. It is something that has taken me many, many years to work up to. Of course, we do regular meetings so I get to be filled in. But at the moment I don’t need to know that something might not be working properly.
That is an amazing feeling and I have never ever felt it. I think in a small way, I might be behind the curve on that. Where my business is and the amount of money we generate and what we have been able to do, I probably should have stepped out years ago but just wasn’t able to. It may be something about my personality wanting to control everything (let’s have a little honesty session right here). I have had my hands in too much for too long.
But I am learning how to step out. And with a scrum master, it has kind of forced me to step out and that is a beautiful thing. So the scrum master, to me, is the most important part of the whole scrum process.
I see the scrum master as the team captain, the leader of the team, and a coach. That person is encouraging and has an eagle eye to watch who is doing what, how they are doing it, and whether it is all working properly. They are the team captain and the coach at the same time during a big promotion.
Some of you might say that it is just “you.” You wonder what to do if you can’t afford to hire help. One thing to consider is that you want to build in more time. If you are putting your backlog together, at a certain time in your backlog you will start adding dates to it to determine when everything will be due.
If it is just you and you are doing everything then you have to give yourself a lot more time. In the end we will talk about the fact that everything takes longer than we think it should. Can I get an amen? It is definitely something that shows up in my business all the time. I say I can get something done in three days but it is ten days later and I am just getting it done.
Because of that you want to give yourself more time with the backlog. But at the same time I want you to consider your limiting beliefs. If you believe it can only be you and maybe a few hours a week with a VA I want to challenge you. It should never be all you. You should always have a little bit of help. And, if you want to generate more revenue in your business you will likely first need to get the support in order to build something that can generate revenue at the level you want it to.
I get it that it is the chicken and egg kind of thing, if you don’t have money coming in for your business, how are you supposed to pay somebody; but, you can always get creative. You can always trade with an “I’ll help you here if you help me there.” You can think of ways to do a quick little promotion to offer one-on-one consulting in order to generate quick revenue to pay for a contractor to work on this or that.
I feel we can be a little more resourceful in order to get the support we need for a big project. Are you going to be fully staffed and totally excited about the team you have created if you have a tiny budget? Of course not, but we work with what we’ve got.
But I do want to challenge you if you think it just needs to be you because you do not have the funds to have a small team. I want you to get more resourceful about how you can get a small team during a promotion and what you can do in order to pay for what you need. There are options out there. That’s my little challenge to you.
Now let’s talk about how the scrum works. First, you have the project backlog. That is what the project owner creates. It is all the tasks you can think of that will go into the promotion you are creating, or the launch, or whatever project you are putting together.
You then have sprint planning. For this, you decide what you are going to focus on inside the backlog during a small sprint. A sprint is usually one week. You plan, inside the backlog, what you are going to focus on for one week. Once you have planned that it is called the sprint planning.
You work as a team on the sprint for one week and that is all you are focusing, what you have decided on in the planning. That is your whole work. During the whole week you have daily scrums. The daily scrums are 15-minute check-in calls with the team.
Once the week is over you do a sprint review. What worked? What didn’t work? What needs to be tweaked? And then you are off to your next sprint.
The beauty of scrum is that you are working inside really small sprints. You look at that backlog and when you see mine you will see that it is a lot of stuff. It would have totally overwhelmed my team if we had looked at the backlog and said everyone should just dive in and get it done.
We don’t do it that way, we decide what we are going to work on for one week. We only focus on those tasks and then we come together the next week and choose more tasks to work on until we complete the project. That’s the beauty of it, the sprints.
Let’s talk a little bit about the project backlog. I look at the project backlog as the roadmap for you to follow in order to get the job done. If you look at it as a roadmap it is everything you need to get from here to there. A scrum project is driven by a product vision compiled by the product owner and expressed in the product backlog.
The product backlog is a prioritized list of what is required ranked in the order of value to your business. The highest valued items are at the top of the list. Once you do a total brain dump and get everything in the backlog then I want you to start prioritizing what needs to get done first. You put those things at the top of the list.
The great thing is, the product backlog evolves over the lifetime of the project. It is ever changing. Items are continuously added, removed, and reprioritized. The way our backlog looks on Day One of preparing for a big launch looks very different on the final day. When we are done with the promotion and look back on our backlog, it will have changed. We will have taken some things out, added some things, and moved some things around.
You can definitely treat the backlog as something that is fluid but at the same time you want to really use it strictly. If anything changes it has to go in the backlog. I will tell you some tools we use in order to keep our backlog really organized; we will get there.
You understand what the backlog is because you have my project plan and can use it as a guide. The next thing you want to focus on is the sprint. Scrum structures project development in cycles of work, the sprints. They are usually one to four weeks in length but I really want to suggest you start out with one-week sprints in the beginning.
Shorter sprints are really valuable because people don’t get lost in the weeds and you always have a really good pulse of what’s going on. The sprints are a fixed duration and end on a specific date whether or not the work has been completed. They are never extended.
If we start a sprint and say it ends on September 1, when September 1 comes around, whether or not people have gotten their tasks completed that sprint is over. Let’s say there is a handful of people that didn’t get projects done, it is a really good time to reevaluate and question what is not working. You will then start over on September 2. You don’t extend the sprint.
The sprint planning that comes before each sprint is really valuable. At the beginning of each sprint a sprint planning meeting takes place. The product owner and the scrum team review the product backlog, discuss the goals, and decide what to do. Here is where I adapt things.
I am the product owner and, of course, I have a scrum master. Usually it is the two of us that look at the backlog. Your scrum team is likely a bunch of contractors, maybe a VA and maybe a project manager who is acting as your scrum master. They wouldn’t even be considered part of the scrum team.
Remember, you have the project owner, the scrum team, the scrum master. I do my sprint planning meetings by meeting with my scrum master. That might be cheating but it has worked really well for us. It is just me and my scrum master. We decide what is going to get done that week. We communicate it to everybody else, and that is when the sprint starts.
One more adaptation is that sometimes the way we have worked with sprints, we have done sprints for pre, live, and post promotion. Sometimes our sprints are as long as four weeks instead of one week.
When I do any kind of promotion we work a whole heck of a lot in the pre phase, pre promotion. I am creating my product, I am working with my product on the marketing materials and we are getting emails written. We are getting sales pages created. You will see it in the project plan I have given you.
We do a whole sprint for pre. That might take up to one month. Then we do another sprint where it is live. The live promotion will usually be two weeks to 20 days. The longest promotion I have ever done is 20 days, that is the Profit Lab. That is another sprint for us. We then have the post sprint which is usually about a week where we clean everything up that we have done. We redirect sales pages, redirect webinar registration pages, and make sure all of the loose ends are tied now that we are done selling.
For me a sprint is pre, live, and post. I have done week-long sprints but for me it is based on how I do my promotions. The pre, live, and post has worked really well and I just wanted to throw that out there for you. I see it as my job to show you how it works inside of a small business and that tends to work really well for us.
Let’s talk about the daily scrum. Now you understand what the backlog looks like and what the sprints look like and how I have adapted them in my own promotions. Now, let’s talk about the most powerful thing I have ever walked away with in terms of scrum, the daily scrum.
The daily scrum is the daily check in. Once the sprint has started the scrum team engages in daily stand-up meetings. I call them the daily scrums. This is a short, 15- minute meeting. It is really important not to go over 15 minutes.
My team and I are not that great at that because I like to chit chat. I need to stop that because if people know it is just 15 minutes they are really productive on the calls. We talk about what we are working on, what we have done, what we need help with. We are in and we are out. Fifteen minutes should be just what you need.
In the Scrum book you will learn that everyone on the team attends the daily calls. We do not do it that way in my small business. At this meeting we have the scrum master,
me (the project owner), and one person on the scrum team. In my case it is my VA, Trivinia, who plays a lot of roles inside the project management backlog.
Trivinia does a lot of the pieces. She works with a lot of the contractors, as does our scrum master. Both of those girls have a very good pulse on what is going on. When we come together daily they kind of represent everybody else.
It would be really weird if I had my designer, my programmer, or anyone else working inside my project get on with us everyday. They are not full time so it is a lot to ask a contractor, “Hey, can you drop everything for 15 minutes every morning while we have a scrum meeting?” It just wouldn’t make sense and I don’t think it’s fair if they are not full time.
Because of that, it is me, the scrum master, and one person on the scrum team who is part of my team and knows everything going on because that is the nature of the VA role. That is how it works for us. We get on and are really efficient, except for my little chit chat when I want to talk about other things.
We focus on three words during a daily scrum. The words are “done”, “plan”, and “problems”. I ask, “What have you gotten done, what are you planning to get done, and where are you having any problems?”
When we do that, everyone is very clear on what is going on. The scrum master may tell what our designer, Jessica, has gotten done and what she is planning on doing for the next day or so. She may also say, “Here’s where we have a problem, Amy. We need your input here or here.” Or she may say the designer cannot get everything done by the end of the week so the focus will be….
Those are the types of conversations we have for 15 minutes every single day. These calls usually start about two weeks before we go live. This is another adaptation: Let’s pretend my sprint for pre promotion is a month long (we are not yet promoting, we are getting ready to promote):
We will usually do our sprint for two weeks and we won’t do daily calls. We will check in about once a week with each other. But once we get two weeks away from going live we start the scrum calls every single day, Monday through Friday. You can decide when you need to start the daily check-in calls but it is usually when you are getting closer to going live with a bit promotion.
Once a sprint is done we do a review. The review is usually the same group: my scrum master; Trivinia, my VA and part of the scrum team; and me. We talk about what worked, what didn’t work. We have a Google Doc and document everything we need to change next time or that we had a problem with. We also include any good ideas. We just put it in there and when everything is over we will do a final review where we will come back to the Google Doc and organize it so that we can use that information for our next launch.
As you can see, I just went through everything. You have the backlog and your sprints and your daily scrums. That is really what is involved in scrumming a project. Does it look perfect inside my team? Heck no! However, it has been dramatically powerful in terms of making things work really well.
I want to give you some tips for the backlog because this is the most important piece of the puzzle and it is basically going to be you, most likely. If you are listening I am going to guess that you are going to be the person creating the backlog.
One thing I want you to do is document all ideas. When you sit down I want you to give yourself a few hours, take a few breaks during those hours, but create the backlog. Document every idea that comes to your mind. I like to do it old school style where I get a big poster board and a bunch of markers and go to town.
I start that way and from there will take everything and put it into an on-line tool. We use Asana. It is our project management on-line tool. That is where we manage every scrum we do. I have heard rumors that Trello is better.
We are not willing to change because it took us long enough to get my entire team using Asana every single day. That was a big task so I don’t want to switch to Trello. However, if I was just starting over I might look into Trello because I heard that once you understand scrum Trello looks a lot like a scrum board.
I am not teaching you everything inside the book, so definitely pick up the book, but inside the book you are basically moving things from the backlog over to the sprint. Once you go through the sprint and you complete things you are moving them to a “done” folder. I guess Trello allows you to move things more visually.
My assistant, Trivinia, also told me about Workboard. It is supposed to be really cool and looks like a scrum board as well. So, Asana, Trello, and Workboard are three different online tools that you might want to you. You do need to put your backlog into some kind of project management tool online so that all of the players can be a part of it.
We did get my designer into Asana. We do have my programmers in Asana. People are working with us inside of Asana. Whatever you do use, I feel your contractors need to agree to come in with you. Basecamp is another one. There is no right or wrong, you just need to find a tool your team will actually use. That is the biggest battle. At least it was for me.
Because everyone has different ideas and personalities and ways they like to use tools, you have to get everyone on the same table. You are the boss so you get to choose which one will work best for you.
Another thing that I like to do inside of Asana is break things up into categories. Suppose there are a bunch of tasks for Facebook ads: Writing the copy, getting the images created, deciding on who we are targeting. That may be a category, Facebook Advertising. Another category might be sales page and another might be promotional emails. We might also have a live webinar category.
All of the tasks are broken into categories so that we can easily find them. Once we get them into categories we then move things into phases including the pre phase (a sprint), the live phase, and the post phase (our final sprint). We then decide who is doing what and when things are going to be due.
You may not have due dates on everything but you do need to find which tasks are the most important to get done first so you can start your first sprint. I think that is important. Don’t kill yourself with trying to put a due date on everything if you are new to this. But, find the things that need to get done right away.
Do not totally sabotage yourself and give yourself two weeks to finish a project that should probably take 30 days. That is another thing we try to do as entrepreneurs. We try to do way too much. I am speaking from the heart here because I do it all the time.
One thing that saves my sanity is to give my team enough time to get things done without killing them. In full disclosure, the recent promotion we are in, Webinars That Convert, I had to start everything from scratch. I give all of you a shout out that are working on your very first project or program.
If you have never created an on-line product before and you are doing it now, it is like birthing a child. It is really hard. Starting from scratch, not knowing what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and figuring out as you go is really daunting. I just want to tell you I get it and I know that’s not easy.
I recently had to start from scratch with Webinars That Convert. I didn’t have a product. We literally had nothing. We had no membership site, we had no sales page, we had no emails written. It has been a long time since I started from scratch. I have been doing the Profit Lab for years so I just get to refine it every time and make it better.
My full disclosure point is that it was really difficult getting Webinars That Convert fully finished. I know I stressed my team out with it. There were a lot of things I wanted to do that were important to include in the product. That meant more work for my team. I wish we had started it a whole month earlier.
If you are ever beating yourself up because you are trying to cram it all in and question why you did it all again, just know that I am years into my business and I did it again. I should have given us a little more time, for sure.
As entrepreneurs we need to be creative. If you are creating content you need the space to be creative. You need some white space around you in terms of not pushing everything back to back to back so you can’t even breathe.
I was creating this product from scratch. Inside Webinars That Convert, if you are a member you know, there are a lot of videos. I did it in a way that was really organized. I teach that there are five phases to every webinar system and the program is broken up into these five phases. I get into detail with each training video for each of the phases.
That was a lot of research, a lot of work, a lot of time recording and creating. So, if I push myself to have to get it done quickly I will lose the creativity. I had to tell my team I couldn’t work on a million other things, I could only work on this. That meant they needed to pick up more slack because I couldn’t do it. I had to focus on the program.
If I had given myself a little bit more time it wouldn’t have felt that stressful to everybody. It’s all a learning process and I always like to throw that out there. At the beginning of this podcast I told you we had sold 651 memberships for Webinars That Convert in less than one week. That is amazing. That is awesome and I am really proud of it.
But I also want to tell you it really stressed me out. I was really up against a wall to make sure it was done properly and on time. It maxed out my team because I didn’t build in as much time as I wanted to. I didn’t build in as much time because I forgot when you are starting from scratch it is a whole different ballgame. There are so many things that are not done.
I will jump off my little soap box but I want you to give yourself a little breathing room if you can. It’s you pushing for those deadlines so we need to remember, “Who’s the boss here?” That’s you. If you need to give yourself more time then you will just give yourself more time. I have learned my lesson for sure. I am really praying that I do not do that again. It was really tough.
There is my little pep talk for you. I hope that you are at least now interested in thinking about scrumming your next project. When you do I want you to remember the most important thing is the backlog. As you start to put that backlog together all of your tasks will take longer than you think it should take. It is just how life is, I think.
Give yourself a little cushion if needed. When you are creating the backlog you are also going to discover new things you want to add. Allow yourself to be flexible. But also, suppose you are right in the middle of putting your project together and your backlog is done. You are doing your weekly sprints and you have something moving.
If a new idea comes up or you think you should have done it a different way, table some of that stuff to the next time you do that promotion. If you follow the way I teach things, I always want you to rinse and repeat. I want you to do whatever you have created again months down the road or once a year. The next time you do the promotion you can add some of the bells and whistles that you might think about while you are in the middle of your project.
There was one idea I had, I won’t share it yet because it is a secret that will be really good, that I will eventually add to Webinars That Convert. I give life-time access so anyone that already purchased will get the extra thing I thought about. But my team said I had a great idea.
They loved it but felt there was no way I could get that done if I wanted to hit the deadline. We decided to put it in Phase II. That was hard, let me tell you. But I definitely tabled it until the next time we promote. Everyone who bought will get the benefit along with the new members. I think that was okay because people have life- time access.
When you mix up your communication during any process, not just scrumming but anything you do, it will cost you money. If you don’t take the time to communicate to your team (this is how I want it done, this is how you do it, let me give you an example) it will cost you money because they will do it wrong.
As the leader of your team, the project owner that has the vision, if there are people that need extra training I want you to make sure that is happening. You can communicate to the scrum master to make a video for people showing exactly how things are done.
We use Jing and SnagIt in my business all the time. I bet I make a new SnagIt video for someone on my team every single day. You can do screen grabs but I make a video so they can see my computer screen and hear my voice. I will say, “Do you see this blog post? I don’t like when it is like ‘this’ and I would really love to see it like ‘this’. The next time we do it can you make sure we follow this process.”
If they have a video they really get it. When you are scrumming and working with a lot of contractors, make sure you are making short little videos and showing people exactly what you want them to do. It’s not fair to assume they can read your mind.
If you are not making Jing (Jing is a free version of SnagIt) or SnagIt videos almost daily as you are working with a big team (someone needs to be making them, either you or your scrum master) then there will probably be a break down in communication. That is just one thing to think about.
The final thing I will add is that you do need to think about what’s not going to get done when you are in the middle of a scrum project. When you are scrumming a lot of things will not get your attention.
Of course you have to keep your business running. For me I still needed to get my podcasts done and I still had commitments with interviews I said I would do and some blog posts I committed to getting done. There were smaller things I needed to do but the bulk of my attention for the last month and a half has been all about Webinars That Convert.
For me and my team, that meant I had to say “no” to a lot. One of my mentors, Marie Forleo, says, “Get on the No Train.” That is so true. You need to feel comfortable saying “no”. It is easier to say “no” because you have something in front of you that is so very important and you have multiple people working on it.
When you are doing daily scrums, checking in with your team, and you have put the money out to hire a scrum master and you know you have multiple people working on something really important, it is easier to say “no” because you have a really clear vision.
If you have ever struggled with saying “no”, once you get your scrum going I promise you it will get easier. I read a quote recently, “The word NO with a period is a complete sentence.” You don’t need to add much more to it. No is no when it comes to, “No, I can’t do that blog post right now,” or “No, I can’t go on that networking trip,” or “No, I’m not going to say ‘yes’ to this great opportunity that looks so good” because I have a vision and I am very clear what that vision looks like, what’s involved in that vision (the backlog), and where we are going because I have someone leading it (the scrum master).
When that all falls into place, let me tell you, it is so much easier to focus on what really matters. Many of you have told me time and time again that you struggle with focusing on projects in your business, you feel pulled in a million directions and everything gets a little piece of your attention but nothing gets your full attention.
When you start scrumming I am telling you, 80 to 85 and maybe even 90% of your attention will go into that scrum and that feels really good. It feels really good to focus on almost one thing. You can’t say it is 100% one thing, but almost one thing for a period of time.
You know that once scrum is over, it is done. I am well aware that on September 21, my Webinars That Convert scrum is done. My live scrum will be done and we will go into post for a few days and then I am done and can move on to something else. And in between I am going to take a big break. That’s another thing, you need to celebrate when you are done with a big scrum project because that is a huge accomplishment. I want you to take a deep breath.
Okay, we just went over a lot. Scrumming is kind of intense and it has dramatically changed my business. If it feels overwhelming to you just now I want you to first commit to going through the book, grabbing the PDF (you can get both at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/75) and I will help you with a model of that backlog. Go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/62download to get my project plan. That is my backlog. That will help you really see what it looks like and it will jar your ideas and inspiration and memory into what goes into your own project.
I think this will help you immensely. Focus on that backlog and you can start pulling everything together.
I cannot wait to hear about all of your big successes with scrum. So keep me updated. I am really looking forward to hearing about your big successes with scrum.
Finally, I want to thank our sponsor, 99Designs. You know when you market online it is really difficult to stand out from all of that online noise clutter. How do you do it? I think you do it through impeccable branding. That includes your logo, your social media cover images, your website, and everything in between. At 99Designs you can get anything designed in just a week for a startup-friendly price.
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There you have it. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I can’t wait to connect with you again soon. Bye for now.
