Category: Focus

What is our Team on Earth for?

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...

Way of Working Improvements – Workshop

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....

Rocks, Pebbles and Sand retrospective – How do we get the most out of our time?

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 Scrum Event Puzzle

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...