In my last post I discussed the pyramid with the five dysfunctions of a team and the appreciation exercise. If you did not see my previous posts, I would highly recommend you to have a look at them first, because this is the last post of a series of posts where I present a possible structure of exercises to help a team recover from a non-productive situation. Here I will explain the remaining exercises necessary to finalize the set of my Team Recover Exercises.
The following exercise is about reinforcing the Scrum values. Lyssa Adkins uses the metaphor of a tree, stating that in order for a team to be highly productive, they need to have strong roots. When the roots are strong and solid the tree can grow and flourish bearing beautiful fruits. Below you can see Lyssa’s example.
Commitment is the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc.. A commitment should never be broken and if it is broken it was not a commitment but an empty promise and a lie. In the Scrum world this means that everyone involved in developing a product is committed to working towards a common objective.
Courage is the ability to confront a fear, pain, a danger, an uncertainty, or intimidation. In software development all these feelings will be always present and it is up to the team members to try to dispel anything that prevents them from being successful.
Openness is the ability to be open to new ideas, new approaches and new ways of working. This is a fundamental state in Agile software development because every day teams encounter different problems that need to be approached differently, being open is mandatory for achieving success.
Focus is the process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. In software development this means teams should completely concentrate on one topic at a time, they should not start a new topic before finishing the previous one.
Respect is a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements. In Scrum all team members interact closely, respect is mandatory for such relationship to work.
In this blog, you can find another point of view about Scrum values. I believe one hour should be enough to refresh the Scrum values with the team. After this exercise they will be ready for a more practical approach.
At this point, with the values written on a flip-chart, the team is ready for a new exercise. Make sure to reserve half of a day for the next exercise. By now you will need a tool to help the team recap the basics of Scrum and I believe the Lego Scrum is highly effective for that. The goal of the game is to simulate every aspect of the Scrum process: the team members will be asked to build an entire city using Lego blocks. The team will have to put in practice everything learned previously. More details about the Lego Scrum can be found here.
After all these exercises I believe the team will be ready to start all over again and start working better as a team delivering software products of higher quality.
I am not expecting to find a super productive team upon arriving to the office right on the next day after the exercises :) This is only a starting point, like I mentioned in my SECOND post, there can be five dysfunctions in a team and the exercises that I proposed are just for tackling the most fundamental problems, such as lack of trust. It is up to the Scrum Master or Agile Coach to continue working with the team in order to help them to overcome problems and to become highly productive as a team.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this series of exercises. If you want to try it in your own team, I would like to ask you for a favour: please, come back and share the results :).
