A Poker game in my Retrospective

If you started recently a role under a team undergoing Agile, this is for you. I started as Scrum Master in my team and here are some of the learning in my journey.

It has been eight months since I officially started my role as a Scrum Master in a very old school fashion team. Until today I have facilitated around 7 or 8 retrospectives myself and some others with the support of my Agile coach and it was not until this post when I decided to start writing about it. I don’t like being repetitive and since at the beginning Agile transformation the team needs time to digest what is going on and the weird new meetings, I thought that to keep everybody engaged I would be doing my best to take out the most during these sessions, which happens every two weeks in my case that was our sprint. In the end this is what it’s all about right? Trying new things, bringing new ideas, coming up with new solutions and wishing to bring alignment and improve collaboration while solving the problems that impacts team performance the most.

1. Workshops

I came across a cards game from Scrum&Kanban and thought I could use it but I was not sure when to introduce it , until the opportunity came up. It was our first retro of the year and we wanted to review the results of the Usability Testing session from our latest Kanban board design, I did not wanted to force the team into our regular retro meetings style, so I introduced the cards game using the poker scenario as an icebreaker.

2. Facilitation

I created one slide with the concepts of the different types of project life cycles and read it for them at the beginning of the meeting. The whole purpose of this game scenario is to warm up or break the ice and get the audience engaged. You give each person three cards with each project cycle e.g iterative, incremental and big bang, after explaining the concepts or refreshing them to the team, you pick two or three scenario cards, you show one project scenario and all participants pick a card with the approach they believe it fits best that project scenario.

3. The Retro meeting

On this occasion all conversations turn out to be funny and people enjoyed listening to other team members talk about their approach. It’s also very scenario dependent, in this case, the card was “planning a wedding”, but aside of trying to understand the different approaches , obviously make them understand the benefits of Agile project implementation, this game was a great tool to bring the team together. In case you see them still a bit tense or not quite engaged yet, you can do another round or two until you feel they are ready or the ice has been broken and conversations already started flowing.

“it was all about trying something new”

4. Experimentation

In the end it was all about trying something new in my retro meeting and showing my team that they could also do the same in their day to day job, think about a new idea or a new project they’ve had in mind for some time. Under the proper Agile environment, it’s all about trial and error and learning from them.

I will keep this game in my backpack and use it in the future to break the ice in my retrospectives

I hope you have enjoyed this article, please feel free to leave any comments.

Do you want to know more about my Agile journey? Read my other post about UX principles and Kanban boards