Author: jcdejong

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Agile Retrospective Smells Cards

During one of nlScrum meetups I heard about The Retrospective Smells Cards. A tool for Scrum masters, agile coaches, and anyone who facilitates agile retrospectives to recognize smells and solve problems or mitigate the impact.

You can find it – and other tools/games – here: https://www.benlinders.com/shop/agile-retrospective-smells-cards/

There are also a couple of interesting articles about smells like: blaming, passiveness and actions. You can find them here: https://www.benlinders.com/portfolio/retrospective-smells/

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The Product Management @Scale game: How can Product Owners scale their role?

Now that many organisations are scaling their agile process one way or the other, Product Owners are faced with the challenge of scaling their already busy role. Kai Stevens created The agile product management @scale game that helps Product Owners identify how to focus on the essential product management activities while making sure that other product management activities will be handed over to other members of their team.

Read about it here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/the-product-management-scale-game-a-simple-way-to-figure-out-what-a-product-owner-should-do-cc143cb85ecd

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Paper Plane Game

Copied from: https://agileparkinglot.blog/2018/11/25/paper-plane-game/

Purpose:

To demonstrate the power of time-box or Sprint that makes the heartbeat of an agile framework like Scrum.

Type:  Team Game

Paper_Plane-512
How many can you build in three minutes?

Time Needed: 45 minutes

Number of people per team: 6

Supplies Needed:

  1. Used Printer Paper 50 per team
  2. One flip chart and a marker to keep score

The goal of the game:

The goal of the game is for each team to create as much high quality tested planes that can fly a distance of at least 30 meters . The world record holder last checked in June 2016 was somewhere in Germany

Each iteration last 9 minutes.

IMG_0974 (1)
One fold at a time
  1. 3 minutes for planning,
  2. 3 minutes of actual build ( test included) time,
  3. 3 minutes for review/retrospective – 

Rules for playing the game:

  1. Build as many paper planes as you can in a 3-minute time box.
  2. One player can only do one fold at a time. That rules stays true for all three time-boxes.
  3. The planes should be built Rules and tested in the 3-minute increment
  4. Only planes that cross 30 meters will be counted
  5. Each team should give a count of how many planes they are going to build before the time-box starts.
  6. Subtract the final count of planes that actually flew from the planes that were built but were not tested or completed.  Eg: Team A said they will make 4 planes, 7 planes flew all the way but 5 were WIP ( work in progress). Subtract WIP so the actual is 7-5 =2
  7. The team has to come up with one idea of improvement at the retrospective. Have one member in the team be the counter.
  8. The front of the plane should be blunt to avoid injury to the team members.
  9. You cannot crush the plane into a ball and throw.

Please recycle the paper once done

Debrief: ( pick any two )

  • Each table talks about what made them improve over the three iterations
  • Talk about what would have happened if the time box was not there
  • Talk about how waterfall may be different from this.
  • Talk about who made the final design decisions in the team.
  • Talk about any wastes they removed from the system that helped them get better.

Disclaimers:

Original Creator: Not me. I am still trying to find out. I learned it from another trainer.

There are many variations of this game. This is one way I  use it in my workshops