Wedding Planning. Every girl’s dream project disguised as a nightmare. Or at least that’s what it was for me, before I knew what I was doing.
Upon announcing my engagement to my college sweetheart, I was stressed. Every night for the first few weeks, I stayed up past midnight reading articles and infographics on wedding planning tips, pinning like crazy on Pinterest where one pin would lead to another leading to forgetting what I was looking for in the first place.
Given the lack of sleep, I projected my newly created stress onto my fiancé (now husband). #imtheworst
Ladies, don’t do this to your future husband…
After calming down with some ice cream, I took a step back and re-approached planning my wedding similar to how I plan my marketing projects at work. (I’m a full-time Project Manager at a marketing agency!)
With any project, there are a standard set of questions/requirements to consider:
- What are the deliverables?
- When’s the due date?
- What’s the timeline?
- What’s the budget?
- Who are the stakeholders?
In this post, I’ll share how I managed our wedding deliverables.
My husband, a Program Manager, and I added another nerdy layer to our wedding planning – scrum methodology.
What is scrum, you ask?
Hint: It’s not the stuff between your toes from Alfafa’s love letter to Darla in Little Rascals.
Scrum is where things happen.
I won’t go into too much detail to risk boring you, but scrum is a an agile project management methodology originally used for software development. Today, it can be applied to any complex large-scale projects — LIKE A WEDDING! #yaaas
There are two scrum tools we applied to our wedding planning: kanban board and stand ups.
Kanban board
A visual, organizational board to organize your project deliverables, assignments and due dates. I created a digital kanban board with a free Trello account, downloaded the free Wedding Command Center board and added my husband to the board (once he created an account). This board is a great starting point and pretty much has every single wedding deliverable (broken out by individual cards) separated by monthly deadlines leading up to the wedding. You can add and tailor these specific to your needs and timeline, of course.
Start one month at a time and create hard deadlines for any key deliverables (like when you should pick a date and venue by).
I went one step further and assigned certain cards (deliverables) to my husband or me as the lead (basically delegating things I wasn’t quite thrilled to do, i.e. selecting an officiant). I also created labels to easily identify the status of the deliverable. See more ways to use Trello boards for wedding planning.
Stand up
A daily check in meeting with your team to discuss a) what they accomplished yesterday b) what they plan to accomplish today and c) if they have any blockers preventing them from completing their work today.
We decided to schedule our wedding stand up for twice a week – every Sunday and Wednesday @7-7:30pm. We put it on our calendar and held each other accountable, even if this meant turning off Sunday Night Football for thirty minutes or leaving Sunday Funday day drinking festivities early.
This is when you open the Trello board and discuss each of you are working on and if we have any key decisions to make together or if we have any blockers.
Be diligent about these meetings! It will help you track progress even if your wedding seems far away (because trust me, it comes around real quick).
Once all deliverables were input in the Trello board and wedding standup was officially scheduled, I felt so much more at ease knowing I’d established a clear plan, visual timeline and dedicated window to discuss/delegate/make important decisions together with my fiancé and that I wasn’t in this alone.
Upon prioritizing my focus, I deferred back to Pinterest for inspo and tips based on what my specific deliverable was that week or month. Check out my Pinterest for wedding inspo and don’t forget to sign up for WeddingWire and TheKnot for additional wedding resources.
Get Your Steph Together 