Author: jcdejong

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A Christmas Retro 🎅🎄

I received the following format via the https://retromat.org/ newsletter:

Emoticon Project Gauge (#32) goes Christmas
10 min | Source: Andrew Ciccarelli

Search and print images of Santa looking

• shocked / surprised

• nervous / stressed

• unempowered / constrained • confused

• happy

• mad

• overwhelmed

Let each team member choose which Santa reflects how they feel about the iteration. They can also give a short reason, if they want to.

Letter to Santa
20 min | Source: Corinna Baldauf

Hand out pens and paper. Give the team members 10 minutes to write a letter to Santa Claus making one big wish for the team. When everyone is done, go around the circle and read out the letters. Are there common themes? The following activity will work better if several participants make the same wish.

Wish granted (#50)
15-20 minutes | Source: Lydia Grawunder & Sebastian Nachtigall

Give participants 2 minutes to silently ponder the following question: ‘Santa grants your wish and it comes true overnight. You come to work the next morning. How can you tell that Santa granted your wish? What is different now?’ Let everyone describe their ‘Wish granted’-workplace. Participants with the same wish can imagine and describe together. (You need breakout rooms for this in a remote setting.)

The more details people describe the more tangible and desirable this future becomes. Keep asking people what they will see, hear, smell, how they’ll behave, … It will lead to better action items.

Be the elf you wish to see in the world
15-20 min | Source Corinna Baldauf

Alas, we all know that Santa Claus isn’t real. Invite the team to be their own Christmas elves. What can they do to turn their wishful future into reality. How can they get one step closer? If there are many suggestions, dotvote which action items the team is going to implement.

Emoticon Project Gauge (#32) goes Christmas – again
5 min | source: Andrew Ciccarelli

Reuse the Santa faces from the beginning. This time ask which Santa reflects how they feel about the retrospective.

If you can, spend some more time in each other’s company. Maybe your organization sent out Christmas packages and you can all share the same cookies or drink the same punch together?

inspired by Santa faces.

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Donkey Kong Retrospective

Today I had another simple and fun retro, this time I themed it using the classic Donkey Kong/Mario.

Here are the steps in which I facilitated it:

  • I invited everyone to open the whiteboard. While everybody was doing so, a nice discussion started about the game itself (old donkey kong) and what everybody’s first gaming experience was (gameboy, amiga, sega, nes, etc). So I gave it a couple of minutes to set the mood.
  • people started playing on the board by moving mario and the flames/barrels 😂 (tip, make sure to lock the level-background, via right click)
  • I invited everyone to take about 10 minutes to come up with items for all of the questions and stick them on the board
  • To signal the timebox was almost over, I started this tune in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cttPiwzcKnc
  • together we walked the board, whenever we identified improvements I already summarized them on stickies and moved those to the last section.
  • during the “What obstacles did we overcome?” section, I added an additional question “what did we learn from this”, this helped us identify some additional improvements we could make
  • I closed the session by asking anyone to recommend a game which we could play as a team together next week, and ended up scheduling a lunch session to play Among Us together

I stole the idea from here 😇: https://medium.com/@dougidle/the-donkey-kong-sprint-retrospective-983b4ae3bb42

donkey-kong-retro-spritesYou can drag these images to your Whiteboard tool of choise and recreate the board 😉
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Retropoly

Retropoly is a game to be played during retrospective meetings of Agile teams. It is based on the Monopoly game concept. It is mainly designed for Scrum teams, but it is suitable with minor adjustments for any other Agile methodology. The game is basically a fun, yet practical, tool to apply the twelfth principle of Agile manifesto: https://www.agilepractice.eu/retropoly/

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The Butterfly Circus

During one of our Scrum Master Gatherings a colleague came up with the idea to use this video as a way to trigger insights within a team on how to let other team members grow without taking the lead, or as a start of a story telling workshop.