Election Manifesto - a timely activity for agile retrospectives

2015-04-29 • , • Comments

Did I mention that I’ve become scrum master for my team? I have now. It’s a new thing for me (and for this blog) but I enjoy it, especially running the retrospective meetings. You have to keep these fresh and one way of doing this is to connect them with what’s going on in the world outside: the Oscars, the eclipse, the general election …

☑

With a week to go, my vote has been posted. So, here’s an activity I devised for a recent retrospective. We were focusing on infrastructure issues and trying to come with improvements. For this, it worked well.

Ask the team to split into three or four “political” parties. Each party must come up with a manifesto for change. What isn’t working? How would they improve things, given the chance? After 20 minutes of discussion, reconvene and ask the party leaders to present their manifesto to the electorate. Be prepared for tough questions and heckling!

Now it’s time to plan a brighter future. Summarise the key points of each manifesto and write them up on sticky notes, using different colours for the different parties. What do the parties agree on? Which promises are unrealistic and which can be delivered?

☑

For more retrospective ideas, I recommend Retromat by Corinna Baldauf. You can find another suggestion of mine, #tweetmysprint, on the Retromat and I’ve submitted this one too.

☑