Active learning cycle

Many teams seem to struggle with keeping track of their improvements from the retrospective. One really useful tool for that is the active learning cycle.

Take a sheet of flipchart paper and divide it into 4 areas: Keep, Try, Breaks and Accelerators. The most common form looks like this but you can always use a different form if it suits you better:

Active Learning Cycle

At the end of the retrospective you put your actions/improvements you decided on in "Try". Those are things that you want to try out. Remember to put the active learning cycle afterwards in a place where everybody can see it, near the team board would be a good place.

Not later than in the next retrospective you use to active learning cycle to decide what you want to do with the actions that are on the cycle.

• Did you like it and you want to continue doing it? Put it in "Keep" and keep on doing it
• Did you think it rather impeded you and you want to stop doing it? Put it in "Breaks". This could be things like "Standup at 2pm", "Digital team board", etc. And, more important: Stop doing it ;-)
• Was it something that helped you but which is nothing you can really keep on doing all the time? Put it in Accelerators. This could be things like "2-day team offsite" (It was an accelerator for the team, but you can't do a 2-day offsite every week).

You don't have to wait though, the active learning cycle is supposed to be a "living" artifact, so you can always move post-its around when you feel it's time to do so. Of course you can also move things from "Keep" to "Breaks" or "Accelerators" if at some point it isn't helping you anymore. Since your active learning cycle will be very full at some point you might have to remove post-its someday. The moment, when you remove something is totally up to you, but from my experience it's best to only remove them, when they've already become second nature to the team.

The Definition of done workshop

Recently one team I take care of as a Scrum Master needed a Definition of Done. Since I couldn't find anything on the internet about a corresponding workshop or a good method to create a definition, I created a workshop based on the "Challenge Cards" method from the book "Gamestorming" (page 158). Here's how you do it:

Time needed:
About 30 - 60 minutes

Preparation:
Prepare green and red colored post its and a blank flip chart (or similar).

How to play:
Divide the team into two groups. One group is the problem group, they get the red post its. The other group is the DoD group, they get the green post its. Now give both groups 10 minutes time.

Ask the problem group to think of common problems the team encounters regarding development, which could be fixed by a definition of done. Examples would be "a lot of bugs", "released version doesn't work" or "duplicate data appears". Important: Point out that it's not about problems the team can't be made responsible for (kernel panic on a server for instance), but that it's about problems that occur due to errors made during development.

Ask the DoD group to come up with possible items for a definition of done. This can be anything they can think of.

After the 10 minutes, ask the problem group to post their first problem on the left side of the flip chart. Now ask the DoD group to post one or more items that can solve this one problem on the right side of the flip chart. Let them draw an arrow going from the DoD item(s) to the problem post it. Notice that there can be more than one DoD items solving a problem and that one DoD item can solve multiple problems. It is ok and desirable to draw arrows from already posted DoD items to a new problem.
Continue until all the problems have been posted.

Now there are 3 possible outcomes:

You still have DoD items left.
Ask the DoD group to post them on the flip chart. After that, ask the whole team if they can think of more items they would like to include on the definition of done.

You still have problems that don't have a possible solution.
Ask the whole team if they can think of anything solving it. After that, ask the whole team if they can think of more items they would like to include on the definition of done.

Every problem has at least one possible solution.
Ask the whole team if they can think of more items they would like to include on the definition of done.

As a last step go over all the DoD items that have been posted on the flipchart during the workshop and ask the team if this item makes sense on a definition of done and if they agree, if this item lands on the definition of done.


Example:
Our result looked like this

Skillboard

Here at CHIP Online we introduced a Skillboard a short while ago. We did this, because we realized that it's hard to keep track of who knows what the larger the company gets.

The skillboard itself is quite easy: You put the skills in the rows (like PHP5, NoSQL or Meeting Moderation) and each row has 3 columns: Basic, Advanced, Pro. These 3 columns represent the knowledge state. Now everyone has the opportunity to put his name at the proper position: Which skill do I have at what level. If you're pro at PHP5, simply put your name in the pro column of the PHP5 row.

The advantage of this skillboard is: If anyone needs help with any technology, he/she can take a look at the skillboard and see if someone in the company has knowledge of it.

Teams Board

In order to visualize who works in which team, we introduced a team board in our company:

On the left is the team name, right to it the people working in the team. The blue index cards are used for the product owners, the yellow cards for the UX designers, the green ones for the team. The Scrum Masters and Kanban Coaches are indicated by the white circle.

Teams working together

5 weeks ago, 2 teams in my company decided to work together for 6 weeks, since the one team needed urgent help. The team helping out was my team.

We decided not to create a new team for these 6 weeks (as this new team would have spent at least 3 weeks to adapt to each other) but to keep a team a team. 

In order to manage this constellation we set up a board that works like a feature board but which visualizes the work of the 2 teams:

The cards on the actual board are not empty, this picture is photoshopped.

We drew 3 rows, each row representing 2 weeks time. The first column was for Team A, the second column for Team B and in the third column was the done column.

In order to visualize which stories are in progress we used pins in the shape of a flag:

Each team has its own color (Team A has white flags, Team B yellow flags). If a task is in progress, it's "flagged". In order to keep track of who did what, the index card stays flagged once it's moved to the "Done" column (you can see the little flags in the Done column on the first photo).

After 5 of 6 weeks I can say I'm really glad we used this board to organize the work of the 2 teams as it made organizing really easy and transparent.

Who's doing what?

When using Scrum Sprintboards or Kanban Boards you usually also want to show who's currently doing what.
We started with pinboards, pins and index cards. In order to visualize who was doing what we printed out a photo of every team member and pinned the photo to the current index card that was in the "Work in progress" (Wip) column.


A while ago we changed this system: We bought a large whiteboard and started using magnets instead of pins. This gave us the chance to print magnets for each team member thus you simply have to put a magnet on the Wip index card to visualize that you're working on it:

As you can see, we didn't use actual photos but gave every team member the opportunity to choose a picture of their liking. I chose Dr. Zoidberg. If you choose to do so aswell, don't forget to include a legend on your whiteboard so that everyone can see which magnet belongs to whom.

Every team member has 10 magnets, which makes it really easy to still know who completed what since the last standup, as we keep the magnets on the index card until the next standup.

You can order the magnets here.