Here’s how your team becomes more agile

How Agile is your organization and how Agile does your team actually work? To find out, mirror your organization or team against the Agile Principles. Take a Scrum Academy card set with the Agile Principles (or print each principle on a separate A4) and play. Because with these cards, you’ll make sure in a concrete way that you’re having the right conversation and you’ll get a shared picture as a team of where you stand. Ready for a bucket of ideas to start improving with?

We play the Agile Principles Game as follows:

Tip 1 – Form teams

Keep the group small. To encourage good discussions among yourselves, commit to a group size of 3-4 team members. If the group is larger, break up into sub-teams and re-unify with a joint final presentation. This makes this exercise easily scalable. Oh yeah, don’t forget the table to lay the cards on.

Tip 2 – Explain the cards.

With your team members, name the principles of the cards one by one and provide appropriate real-world examples. By mentioning the examples, it becomes a very tangible theoretical principle. No room for abstraction for a moment.

Tip 3 – Rate your team / company

Once all 12 principles are clear to everyone, it’s time to give the principles a rating. On which principle do we feel we are doing well and where does it show? Place it at the top of the table. The principle on which we as a team score the least, we place at the bottom. A clear picture emerges.

Tip 4 – Debate

The challenge may be to form a common position on your rating. Therefore, listen carefully to each other’s arguments. Asking, “Does anyone object if we give this principle this rating?” can help the team reach a decision more quickly. Dare to ask.

Tip 5 – Define actions

What actions do you think of to improve an Agile Principle? There are probably too many to tackle right away. So prioritize your actions on impact and complexity: which actions have the biggest impact and are also easy to implement? Put those at the top of the action list and pick them up. The other items will come up again in the next round. Or not, because the world can change quickly.

Forget your poker face, throw your cards on the table and get Agile!

Good luck.