Help Agile Knoxville BE Agile – Survey says!

Let’s not just Do agile, let’s BE agile!
Transparency is the stem that everything comes out of.
Adaptation and Inspection are the other two foundation principles.

scrum-flower

So let’s practice inspection and adaption with Agile Knoxville Meetup and help me make it better or at least get a few more people to come! 😉

Just takes a few moments of your time
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HV8R56L

Thanks!

Survey says….

See the results yourself below! Some initial action items I’m taking are:

  1. I’ll continue to try and find a place in West Knoxville – Cedar Bluff area mid-week and experiment with trying to start earlier as well especially if more say they want to. If anyone knows of a good place, let me know!
  2. This month’s retro will be about how to work with challenging personality types in a team setting. Please start thinking of what you’d like to learn how to handle better.
  3. I’ll be sending out reminders through Meetup, LinkedIn, AgileKnoxville.com, and AgileInitiatives.com, and Twitter and Facebook. I also post links and helpful articles and videos through all of these throughout the month. Plus, if anyone wants me to add your email to a reminder please email agileinitiatives@gmail.com.
  4. I’m going to incorporate more opportunities for hands on learning as well.
  5. I’ll continue to do all of the other topics as well and if anyone has anything at any time let me know – no one had any other suggestions, so we are doing the things I see the most often.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply – I sure do appreciate it!

Using current events in retros – Olympic Retro

Even though the Olympics have wrapped up across the world, they produced some great quotes and pictures – this one inspired an entire retro and the creation of a new way to Gather Info!

olympicretrowork

Here is the Olympic themed retro

  1. Goal
    1. Look at the value of focus
    2. Identify and gather feedback
    3. Create action items
  2. Focus ON – awesome Olympic quotes on the power of Focus. We discussed them and I asked if people agreed or disagreed, if people thought it took focus to become an Olympic athlete, and what are the benefits of focus.9e208a258510cac84ca520cf222cb8c5largeEverything is vague
  3. Energizer – Olympic Team Charades – to get everyone in the competitive spirit we broke into two teams and played charades. The learning points were; listening, creativity, focus, teamwork, and competition, plus laughter of course 🙂
  4. Gathering Data – Olympic Retro
    1. Trophy = success, things that are working great – keep it up!
    2. Medal = things, people, processes that are working but need improvement.
    3. Stink eye (use the pic of Michael Phelps giving the stink eye) = things that are not working BUT improvement is possible
    4. Foot in boot kicking = things that need to be disqualified, stop doing them

Olympic Retro

5. Analyze and Create SMART Action Items

6. Close-Out – Story cube question? “If this sprint had been an Olympic competition it would have been…..

Summary: The team enjoyed the current event connection in the retro, the actual Gathering Info section worked well and I’ll definitely use it again. The addition of a game was also helpful to get everyone in the right frame of mind for the Gathering Info section.