For Agile Leaders Only -- Exploring the "Hard Bits"
This session is for any Agile coach or leader who is facing challenges and looking for creative ways for facing them.
In this practical session we hope to do two things. First, mine some of the hardest, real-world problems that attending Scrum Masters and other Agile Leaders have faced within their teams. We’ll do this by breaking into teams and having each team first brainstorm a list of challenges and then dot-vote on what they think is the toughest problem.
Next, each group will share on their top challenging situation. We’ll allow group membership to change so folks can align with a challenge that most interests them. These new groups will then sort through options for facing that challenge.
We’ll introduce Force Field Analysis as the facilitative tool to help each of the teams drive toward a challenge facing strategy. They will:
• Describe the challenge Context
• Establish a Goal for facing the challenge or resolving the issue
• List forces creating the challenge (Forces For); what’s behind it? The root cause?
• List what forces would support resolution (Forces Against); Who would be interested in a new course? In problem resolution? What would be the team or business value shown?
• Finally, from the 2 forces, for and against, start developing an Action Strategy to meet the overall stated goal
We’ll wrap-up the workshop by having each of the teams share on their strategies for attacking unique problems. If there are similar problems, multiple teams will share on them together. Attendees should leave with a set of anti-patterns AND effective strategies for facing them.
As you can tell this is a 3 part workshop.
Part one, 30 minutes, will be focused on generating challenges and then sharing them around the group
Part two, another 30 minutes, will be focused on strategy development for meeting those challenges
Part three, the final 30 minutes, will be focused on sharing / discussing those strategies
In order to get the group “thinking” in the right direction, we’ve developed a “seed list” of challenge scenarios that might be helpful in (1) using the scenario framework to frame your challenge, and (2) getting a set of “typical” and “hard bit” challenges out there for discussion.
We’ve used this format for internal Scrum Master training at our company. I’ve also used it for Creating Agile Conversations workshops in a couple of conference venues. It works quite well. The idea is to get to those really hard, “it depends on your context”, types of scenarios that we all face each day—then use the power and experience of Agile Leaders to sort out some options.