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...
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....
As a Scrum Master I was looking for a way to bring the (new) scrum guide to my teams attention, and to make it relevant for them in a playful way. We started with a workshop on the scrum events. This sprint I facilitated the Scrum Event Puzzle for one of my teams. It was a fun way to discover what the scrum guide has to say about scrum events, and it also introduced the team to one or two changes in the 2020 version of the scrum guide (for example the added ‘why’ in the Sprint Planning). The goal of the workshop was to educate ourselves on what the scrum guide says about the scrum events, and discover the gap between the team’s practice and the scrum guidelines. (And of course how to close this gap!) Preparation I created a digital whiteboard with empty columns for every scrum event, and pasted all statements about scrum events from the scrum guide on the whiteboard, like this (these are in Dutch): (all pictures are...
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