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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...
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 great (and free!) association card deck. You can use these association cards for a check in....
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....
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,...
To be honest, Ido not really care about Formula 1. But my husband is passionate about it and watches every Grand Prix. Last Monday I needed some inspiration for my team’s retrospective. And I thought of last Sunday’s GP in Baku, what had happened with Verstappen, Hamilton and Vettel. It turned out to be a great analogy for our futurespective, because my team is working towards an important finish line too. Check in As a check in I asked the team: how do you feel about last sprint on a scale of Max Verstappen? The retrospective We started the retrospective and talked a bit about last Sunday’s race and the importance of adapting to changing circumstances, having a great start, not taking too much risk, having a great strategy and collaboration. These qualities made Vettel, who started 11th, end up 2nd place. On the other hand, Max Verstappen was also doing great but had a puncture in one of the final laps, so he...
My first video in which I share a practical scrum idea. What are you – my fellow scrum masters and agile coaches – experimenting with these days to serve your teams best? Please share in the comments so we can learn from each other! (A big thank you to my team who supported me in sharing this video :-))
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...
