Improving Our Agile Practice Together
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. In this planet retrospective we asked ourselves the above question and dived into the topic of green software engineering to find answers and practical ideas on how to reduce our carbon footprint as a scrum team. We started with a Planet Check In...
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...
A while ago I was looking for a way to bring the scrum values (courage, respect, openness, commitment and focus) to my team’s attention. This team had their scrum practices in place, but the effectiveness of scrum increases when team members become better at living the values. So we did a retrospective about the importance of the values, and discussed what they mean to team members personally. Check in First we started with a check...
Defining the Team Mission For a longer period of time I had noticed that one of my teams had trouble finding and keeping focus. When I asked different team members what our mission was, I would get different answers. So I decided to do a ‘WHY’ session with my team, with the aim to clarify our team mission. If you would like to do this session with your own team, you can find the link...
In retrospectives I love to work with images in stead of sticky notes. It helps people to think outside of the box, to see things from a different perspective. Working with images has several advantages: Here are some ideas that worked really well with my scrum teams. 1. Check In with (online) association cards Have a look at this or this great (and free!) association card decks. You can use these association cards for a...
One of my scrum teams was eager to improve their Way of Working, and wanted to find out what improvements they could agree on to start with. So I created a whiteboard with possible improvements, based on observations and one-on-ones with team members the last months. I gave them the opportunity to add their own ideas, and used the Liberating Structure 124ALL as a method to determine a top 3 supported by all team members....
One of my teams was struggling with an overwhelming overload of work. They felt the pressure of growing expectations from the organization and – at the same time – a lot of ad hoc work that wasn’t on the backlog. They wanted to meet everyone’s expectations and were always willing to help everyone. But how to find the balance between planned and unplanned work, and focus on the important stuff? I wanted to challenge the...
The week before Christmas my teams and I looked back on the past year (using the Team Christmas Table game). During this team session we used the below list of questions. The questions were formulated for end-of-year reflection, but you can use them to look back on any given time frame. I asked my team members to roll a dice one by one and answer the question with the matching number. If there was a...
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Watch my conversation with Joanne Stone about helping our teams to reduce their carbon footprint when developing.
