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The Agile Playground - Improving Our Agile Practice Together

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

Grow Green with your Scrum Team

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...

Growing Green

Workshop ‘Planet Earth as Our Stakeholder’

How it started As I was looking for ways to do something meaningful about climate change, the idea started to grow that at work, in my own Agile teams, we could also take a sustainability perspective. I delved into the subject of sustainable IT and started with a ‘Planet as a Stakeholder Retrospective’ for my Scrum Team in which we went over the Principles of Green Software Engineering. We discussed what steps our team could take to...

close up of globe

Growing Green

Grow Green with your IT Team – Inspiration & Resources

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...

Check In / Growing Green

Planet Check In

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...

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...