Agile Project Management and Writing

In December, I met with a student to discuss data collection for her senior thesis. We started talking about the project more generally, and she shared with me her strategy for making the larger project more manageable through something she called “scrum planning.” Intrigued, I asked her to share a screenshot of her planning document and some notes on what she was doing so that I could share them with other thesis students. I dug deeper into this strategy and will share what I learned in this blog post.

Scrum is a strategy or framework within agile project management used to organize work processes during specific phases of a larger project. Originally developed to guide the software development process, agile has been adapted for project management in many industries. A defining process of agile is its emphasis on iteration. As projects progress, teams learn and adapt their work through a series of development phases, evolving toward a desired endpoint. This method differs from traditional project management approaches that develop a detailed plan and requirements at the outset with the expectation that the team will follow the plan through a single development phase. The emphasis on iteration makes agile an ideal approach for managing writing projects.

What my student described as “scrum” was actually a sprint. She had divided her thesis timeline into two-week phases or sprints, setting targets or goals for each period. Scrum, on the other hand, refers to the regular team meetings that review the progress of the current development phase. Biweekly meetings with her thesis director functioned as a scrum in her case.

So, what are the key features of this approach, and how do you apply them to writing?

1. Sprints. These are smaller units of time (think 2 weeks to a month) within a larger project calendar. In agile, the idea is to deliver a working product within that time frame. For shorter pieces, a complete draft at the end of a sprint might be a reasonable goal; however, a section or chapter is probably more realistic.

2. Milestones. Each sprint has a goal or milestone affiliated with it. Here, I think about Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, where each week is focused on a different aspect of drafting or revising a manuscript for publication (e.g., selecting a journal, refining the works cited, crafting claims for significance).

3. Tasks. The milestone tells us where we are heading, but we need some sense of how we will get there. Outlining specific tasks to help us reach the milestone is a third aspect of this process. If your milestone is selecting a journal, one task might be to engage in what Dannelle Stevens calls a text structure analysis in Write More, Publish More, Stress Less!

4. Task Tracking. Each task will have an assigned status: to do, in progress, done, or blocked. My student used a simple check box in an Excel document to note the status of tasks within each sprint. You could also use a Kanban board created with a whiteboard and sticky notes or digital project management software. In Clickup, I can color code these different stages or select a Kanban view (learn more about how I use this for project management here). The blocked status is one I don’t use a lot, but it may be an important one to implement, especially for collaborative writing projects. For students working on a thesis or dissertation, blocked tasks may indicate an agenda item for the next committee meeting. Understanding what prevents you from completing specific tasks can help you identify practical workarounds, adjust your overall timeline, or reevaluate the necessity of a particular project element.

5. Reflection. As noted above, a key aspect of this agile framework is the scrum or meeting designed to assess progress. But how do you build this into a solo writing project? Rebecca Pope-Ruark describes using questions from the daily stand-up in scrum as a way to do a weekly reflection on research and service obligations. You could also adapt these as freewriting prompts to use at critical points in a sprint (e.g., at the midpoint and the end), or you might use these as a kickoff to each work session within a sprint. The questions include:

• What have I done since my last check-in to meet my goal?

• What will I do today to meet my goal?

• What might I be stuck on or need help with?

How about you? What strategies are you using to manage your writing projects?