How it started A few years ago, while searching for a meaningful way to act on climate change, I started to wonder: what if I brought a sustainability perspective into my own Agile teams? I delved into the topic of sustainable IT and started with a Planet Retrospective for my Scrum team, working through the Principles of Green Software Engineering. We talked about what steps our team could take to reduce the carbon footprint of...
Back home from a beautiful (hot!) holiday in Toscane, the children have another 4 weeks off ahead. I wanted to help my 8-year-old boy and 7-year-old girl design the rest of their holiday (within some constraints!) by letting them express all the cool things they wish to do these weeks. My idea was to get an overview of their wishes so we could plan together. That way, we won’t miss out on the things that...
As Scrum Masters, one of our key responsibilities is to effectively help improving team communication. Not always an easy task! Especially when team members have very diverse personalities. In one of my teams we encountered challenges because the communication styles varied so greatly. Some of the team members are extraverted and eager to take the lead, while others are way more reserved and need time to respond. To address this, we did a retrospective about...
This past July, I traveled to Dallas to give a talk about “The Planet as a Stakeholder” at the Agile2024 conference, hosted by Agile Alliance. What an experience it was to be at such a large conference and to be able to contribute! Earlier this year, I submitted a proposal for a talk at the Agile2024 conference. As I often submit proposals to conferences, I honestly didn’t expect it to be accepted and had almost...
Climate change. For the past few years I struggled with this topic and with my own role in it. It felt like a far to big problem to have a serious positive impact on, but also a far to big a problem to ignore. Until I realized the following. We as Scrum Masters, Developers, Product Owners, Agile Coaches, we are everywhere! In all the big companies around the globe. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we...
Our environmental challenges Scientists urge us to be climate-neutral by 2050. In order to reach that goal we must cut carbon emissions by at least 55% in 2030. This leaves us with just 7 years to drastically alter our pathway: we will have to cut our carbon emissions at a revolutionary speed. Every IT team needs to turn the lens on itself and ask: ‘how are we impacting the planet, and what can we do...
Background In the past couple of months I dived into the topic of sustainability for scrum teams. Because I, like so many people inside (and outside) of my teams, am looking for ways to help the climate. We started with a Planet Retrospective about Green Software, in which we defined the first steps towards reducing the carbon footprint of our IT landscape. Setting the stage with the Planet Check In But before we started with...
As a Scrum Master I was looking for a way to help my team understand the accountabilities of the scrum roles and to make it relevant for them in a playful way. I thought about the Scrum Event Puzzle that I did quite some time ago and used the same concept for teaching the scrum roles. The goal of the workshop: to help the team understand what the scrum guide has to say about the scrum roles, and discover the gap between the team’s practice and the scrum guidelines (and of course how to close this gap!). Preparing the Workshop I created this Mural board with empty columns for every scrum role, and pasted all statements about scrum roles from the Scrum...
What would we do differently if we treated Planet Earth as our stakeholder? My scrum teams and I are looking for ways to become more sustainable and reduce our IT carbon footprint. Inspired by Jutta Eckstein‘s notion of ‘prioritizing the planet as one of the stakeholders’ we asked ourselves the above question. We delved into the topic of green software engineering to find answers and practical ideas on how to reduce our carbon footprint as...
Wow, the Agile principles! Together with the Agile values they form the Agile Manifesto, the foundation of all Agile frameworks. But while most scrum teams (hopefully) have at least some understanding of the values, the principles are a bit less on the forefront. So I wanted to find a way to teach my team about the principles, because I feel if they understand and internalize the Agile values and principles, they have a profound basis...
Due to our company’s Agile transformation I had the opportunity to start with a whole new team. Some of our new team members already knew each other from previous teams, others didn’t know each other at all. In the first weeks things didn’t go that smooth. It was clear that under the surface we weren’t on the same page as it came to expectations, vision, way of working, etc. And even though we tried to...