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...
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...
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 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...
It’s almost Christmas time, and this week is the last week before some of my team members go on holiday. Time for a Christmas Dinner Retrospective! I wanted to create an atmosphere in which we could lean back, reflect and look back on the past year. So I created a digital Christmas table setting with digital food and beverages, with assignments in different rounds. First I welcomed the team to the Team Christmas Table and...
One of my teams has had many challenges, like: But despite these challenges the team does a really great job. They collaborate really well to achieve our sprint goals (and they achieved all sprint goals since last March!), they do their scrum events and strive to improve their way of working every sprint and they manage their dependencies outside the team better every sprint. Time for a positivity retrospective! We looked back on the positive,...
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