Continuing my blogging around agile game play, I attended Gabrielle Benefield’s product creation workshop today, one of my key takeaway’s was a pretty simple, yet powerful learning game, Paper planes.
Team Challenge #2
{“Nothing can drag you down if you’re not holding onto it.
We all have tendency to hang on to things, perhaps it is a way of working, or a behaviour, or a judgement of one of our co-workers… in order to move forward as a team, we may well have to let go of strongly held belief’s…what can you do as a Scrum Master to show the way, what can you let go of ? Continue Reading
Team Challenge # 1
{“The Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new“}
I have been reading a discussion on Jordan Bortz’s site, around the Lack of Scrum Success stories becoming a concern… in principal I agree with the title, there are far to few success stories…but that is not the failing of scrum or agile in my view. Continue Reading
There is no getting away from it, nor should we want to, organizations want to be able to measure teams, their output, performance, yield, what ever you want to call it…
What is the goal here ? for me, the goal is not to measure agility, or to become agile, but to become predictable. If we become predictable at delivering quality products, it’s a game changer for the organization. Continue Reading
Just back from the UK Agile Cxoaches Gathering 2011, an Open Space conference, in bletchley park, there were around 30 or 40 passionate men and women who had an interest in discussing coaching teams and organizations, who are working in or towards some form of agile methodology.
Some of us met up on the Friday evening to agree the agenda, hour long slots across 6 or so rooms. The first session I went to was hosted by Pierluigi Pugliese , on how Virginia Satirs - Family therapist techniques can be used in agile coaching. The method identifies 4 key roles that people default to when under pressure / stress (read Management encouragement J ) and can be used by a coach as a signal that something has changed for that member of the team. Thkey message is that when were in these modes (yes us coaches fall into them also) we are reducing our options when were in them. For more information on the roles you can find Pierluigi’s presentation on slideshare . Continue Reading
I recently attended a Limited WIP society meetup at Skills matter, where Karl Scotland and John Stevenson ran the Ball flow game as a way to introduce Kanban to people. The game originated as a way to introduce Scrum and I had the opportunity to run such a session this week, however I decided to tweak it a bit to enable various scenarios to be experienced by the participants and to support specific conversations.
Here is the setup:
1. Initial Presentation
Team makes an initial presentation of the scrum framework to the room. Purpose: to give the facilitator an idea of where they are on their Journey of learning scrum / agile, it also acts an ice breaker. It’s important to stress that it’s really not about getting it right, the value is in the conversations that are generated.
2. Present the rules of the game
- You are one big team
- Each person must touch each ball
- Each ball must have air-time
- No passing the ball to your direct neighbour
- The Start Person = End Person
- Each Iteration = 2 min
- Each Retrospective = 1 min*
- Each Sprint Planning = 1 min*
(* having 1 minute for the retrospective and 1 minute for sprint planning, did not really work, it was difficult to keep the team to that 2 minutes, one variant might be to setup an automatic timer for the whole meeting so the team has to self manage their time)
3. Present the roles
If you have all the roles in the room , then great, otherwise the facilitator can play the different or absent roles
- Team
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Manager
The purpose of having the roles, is to introduce them, and for the later sprints in which we introduce some typical challenges, if your only going to run sprints 1-5, then you can drop this out from your agenda.
Last Thursday I was speaking at the Agile Evangelist meet up at skills matter. It is a new group of people focused on all things agile in London. I ran a version of the “35 Game”, (see an earlier post for more details on that)
On the night, the question that we asked was, what are key factors for companies to consider when adopting agile. There was lots of challenges created in writing the question this way, some intentional, some not. Continue Reading
I came across the 35 technique for gathering input from a team on Lyssa Adkins blog, and have been wanting to try it for a while, and I ran it yesterday, with some changes, which worked brilliantly.
Purpose:
Used to quickly gather input or feedback from a team, found it especially useful for team with communication issues
Materials:
Flip Chart(pre-written agenda, and timing) , Markers (ideally the same ones for each person, same color), Cards, Stopwatch
Recently I had the fortune to be asked to co facilitate at a session for Yahoo! on a market research project that was being produced by The Innovation Games(R) Company.
One of the great things I noticed straight away is that people were excited and intrigued about playing games, not that they really knew yet, what the games were or what it would be like.