The First Five Steps to Become Really Agile

Linking Games with Our Work

This year Pascal and I are creating new conference sessions to demonstrate the bundles of tools and techniques we use when coaching Agile teams.

What Agile Means to Us

Agile is about delivering the highest business value possible faster by focusing on people and Continuous Improvement. While collaboration remains a key theme in everything we do, something more elemental has emerged out of our creative sessions: the importance of mutual understanding.

So what’s new?

‘The First Five Steps to Become Really Agile’ session is made up of 5 tools designed to help create a team out of a bunch of strangers and strengthen the relationships among an existing team. Each tool aims to help us better understand ourselves and each other.

• Tool #1: The Profile Card Exercise – To get to know other members of the team in a fun and creative way.
• Tool #2: The Agility Rating Exercise – To surface your own strengths and weaknesses so that you can come up with ways of improving yourself.
• Tool #3: The Find-the-Bottleneck Exercise – To focus your efforts on improving the bottleneck and have maximum impact on improving the system’s throughput.
• Tool #4: On Defining Acceptance Criteria – One way of defining ‘Done’. Follows the scenario definition format from Dan North: GIVEN[some context] WHEN [event] THEN [outcome]
• Tool #5: The 4-Quadrant Retrospective – To practice Continuous Improvement and become a little bit better at what you do every day.

This session was first presented at XPDay Switzerland in French earlier this month and has been subsequently presented in English among strangers now friends.