Transcript
Vasco (0:04)
Hey there, Agile adventurer, just a quick question.
Host (0:07)
What if, for the price of a.
Vasco (0:09)
Fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast.
Host (1:11)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to our success. Thursday this week we have with us Alex Slowly. Hey, Alex, welcome back.
Alex Slowly (1:18)
Hey, Vasco.
Host (1:20)
So it's a pleasure to have you back to talk about perhaps the most important question of the week, what success looks like for Scrum Masters. But before we dive into that, do share with us, Alex, your favorite agile retrospective format.
Alex Slowly (1:36)
Oh my goodness. I mean, this is like the retro is the Scrum Master's jam. So there's so many retrospectives to choose from and I really struggle like identifying one. But I finally came to a pretty good answer, I think. And here's my answer. I love retrospectives that include sticky notes. As long as it includes sticky notes, I'm like, good to go. And I'll tell you why. It's because with sticky notes you can visualize anything. You can visualize the good and the bad and you can visualize the improvements or the Kaizens. You can visualize the options that were, are, or could be. You can visualize the possibilities and you can even visualize metrics using sticky notes. And it's an engaging way for the entire team to get together and make things transparent, because that's what visualizing stuff is. It's making stuff transparent and putting it out there so everybody can see it. Now, like in Scrum, we talk about the pillars of Scrum transparency, inspection and adaption. And it's a virtuous cycle. You got to have the transparency in order to inspect and you got to have inspection in order to adapt, etc. Right? So sticky notes are so beautiful, you can move them anywhere, you can write anything you want on them. And you can use your imagination, the sky's the limit, to visualize stuff like different size sticky notes, different color sticky notes, different positions of the sticky notes, and you can describe constraints in your system that you wouldn't normally get. You can visualize so many cool things. Like you can visualize like how many interruptions or how much unplanned work comes into a team, or you can do like blocker clustering or impediments that comes into the team team. You can visualize flow. You can do all this visualization not only in the retrospective, which looks back and reflects on your sprint, but you can do it in the sprint itself, like in your planning, in your review, or your daily scrums. So I'm being pretty generic and then I'm like, just use sticky notes. But here's how can I help you get more practical about it? So be strategic about being visual. If you figure out something that you need to address as an impediment or something that you need to work with the team together to make better or whatever it is, figure out what that challenge is, and then get together with the team and think about ways to make that challenge visual. And then you can start to create experiments that visualize that stuff. So then it becomes like, identify the challenge. How do I make it visual? Start making it visual. And then once you start making it visual, magic can happen because the team can see it, everybody else can see it, and then people can start to come up with ideas because they're starting to see things that they've never seen before. So for me, it's using sticky notes is a strategic thing and it's a process and that you're identifying things to make better, using visualization to make it transparent, and then coming up with ideas to solve that thing. You made transparent.