Check In / Creative Team Sessions / Growing Green

Planetary challenges – opening the conversation

Background Over the past couple of years I’ve worked with many teams to help integrate climate awareness (and action!) into their daily work. Leading many of these sessions I learned how important it is to address the strong feelings people have about our planetary challenges, before diving into any of the work. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution…. Themes that can make your heart sink. Or themes that you don’t want to face because of the...

Agile WoW / Creative Team Sessions / Growing Green

Workshop ‘Planet Earth as Our Stakeholder’ (updated version)

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...

Agile WoW

Family Summer Planning

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...

Agile WoW / Creative Team Sessions / Retrospective

Improving Team Communication (with Playmobil:))

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...

Growing Green

Planet as Stakeholder @Agile2024

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...

clear light bulb planter on gray rock

Growing Green

Climate Change and IT: Agile Teams Can Make a Difference

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 a few 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...

Teaching Scrum

The Scrum Roles Workshop

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...

person holding world globe facing mountain

Growing Green / Retrospective

The ‘Planet as a Stakeholder’ Retrospective

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...

Agile WoW / Check In / Retrospective

Agile Principles Retrospective

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...

Agile WoW

Defining Our Ideal Team Culture

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...

photo of people near wooden table

Agile WoW / Check In / Retrospective / Scrum Values / Scrum Values Inspiration / Teaching Scrum

The Scrum Values – Creating Strong Teams

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...