
Facilitation is the art of being a neutral third party having no substantive decision-making authority and helping a group increase its effectiveness and decision-making process. In the game of Scrum, Facilitation is explicitly required in the events of Sprint Planning, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective, but you can use it for all 5 scrum events including Product Backlog and Product Refinement.
Diagram from Gamestorming book
Before the meeting starts, it’s good to have everyone on the same page in terms of what behaviors are encouraged and those that are potential obstacles to a valuable meeting. It’s best to come to the meeting with “suggested” ground rules and ask the team if they are willing to “opt-in” to those rules. Also ask if there are any rules they would like to add. Some suggested ground rules are:
A technique that allows participants to vote their preferences among a set of items by placing a colored dot on items that they believe are higher priority than other items. Items with more dots are higher priority than items with fewer dots. This technique is frequently used during the Sprint Retrospective activity. We also have a blog written by Kriti On this majority-based group decision technique, Dot Voting – Democratic Facilitation Tool – by Kriti Jaising
A consensus-based group decision technique Fist of five voting is best used when a group needs to choose one option and also gauge a degree of consensus
A consensus-based group decision technique Roman voting is best used when a group needs to choose one option. This voting is effectively used in our training classes to quickly arrive at consensus. It is easy fast, and it is fun.
Here is what I call a “simple” Roman Voting technique.
The SailBoat exercise helps teams define a vision of where they want to go. SailBoat is especially great tool to help teams identify risks during their path and allows them to identify what slows them down and what helps them to achieve their objectives.
During our class Retrospective activity, we approximately give students 10 minutes to write post-it on Miro where we have picture of a sailboat. The anchor on the SailBoat is everything that is slowing them down on their journey. The clouds and the wind represent everything that is helping them to reach their goal. In the end we spend time discussing and continue to practice what was written in the clouds and working together to choose the most important issue that is slowing the team down. At this point if we do not find agreement, we can always use dot-voting to tackle most important topics/issues for the class.
Liberating Structures – Introduction
The Skilled Facilitator – Roger Schwarz
Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play -Luke Hohmann
Shazia Mirza is a Certified Scrum Master and a Certified Product Owner. She works as a consultant at Concepts and Beyond. She also Facilitate Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) workshops.
The internet and social media are full of Agile, Scrum, Product Management, and DevOps jargon, including incorrect and misunderstood concepts. This could be problematic for a learner seeking knowledge. Without a course with Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, or DevOps Institute, this knowledge is difficult to achieve.
The Concepts & Beyond blog is a free suite of articles and videos packaged in tiny chunks. You will learn or refine your knowledge and skills to help your team and organization be effective. When you want to take your knowledge further, we invite you to join us for our Certified ScrumMaster(CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified DevOps Engineering Foundations (DOEF) and Training from the Back of The Room courses across the USA and Canada.
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