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 in. I asked the team: how are we doing with regard to the scrum values? This set the stage and we discussed the importance of each value for the team. I used mentimeter, it’s a free tool which makes it easy to create interactive team sessions.

With the input from the check in I facilitated a discussion about the importance of the five scrum values, and why the values are important traits of strong teams. Or like the Scrum Guide puts it:

“Successful use of Scrum depends on people becoming more proficient in living these five values (Focus, Openness, Respect, Courage, Commitment).”

Scrum Values Retrospective

I asked the team to contemplate on the five values, and discuss the following questions:

• Which scrum value(s) would you like to experience more in our team, and why? (on yellow post-its).
• Which scrum value do you want to improve on personally, and why? (pick an avatar and place it on the value you want to improve on).
• How would the team benefit from these improvements? (on orange post-its).

After the discussion the team came up with improvements and defined actions for the coming sprint.

You can find a Mural template of the Scrum Values Retrospective here.

Tips

If you’d like to try this retrospective with your team and there are a lot of different findings, ask your team to vote on the most important improvements and benefits, and define the first actions.

Also, with a themed retrospective like this, it’s always helpful to create a parking lot for other issues. It gives the team the opportunity to address things that need attention besides – in this case – the scrum values.