Writing first is a facilitation technique where participants collect their thoughts in writing before having a discussion. This allows more participation from those that need time to gather their thoughts or feel more comfortable expressing themselves in writing. The facilitator will set a time period for silent writing, then participants share their thoughts once the writing time is up.
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Stacking is a facilitation technique which ensures that everyone’s voice is heard. The facilitator acknowledges each person who wants to contribute and establishes an order in which they will share. The result is that each person knows when their turn is and that they won’t be forgotten.
In this third part of our facilitation techniques series, we’re using questions for elaboration to encourage further conversation.
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In part two of our facilitation techniques series, we’ll practice mirroring: what it is and when to use it for effective facilitation.
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This morning I woke to the sad news that Steve Bockman passed away. Steve was a friend, co-worker, creator, problem solver, agilist, and one of my heroes. Steve worked at Agile Learning Labs from 2009 – 2012. In his Hawaiian shirts, his presence was always fun, friendly, and engaging.
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Looking for techniques for effective facilitation? In this first part of our facilitation techniques series, we’ll dive into paraphrasing: what it is and how to use it.
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Still hearing sprint planning being referred to as a two-part event? Ever been in a sprint planning where developers had to explain their plan of work to the product owner and scrum master?
What you may be dealing with are relics of sprint plannings past. To understand how sprint planning has changed, we’ll take a look at the evolution of the event throughout the years.
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Are looking to get an agile job, such as scrum master, product owner, or developer on a scrum team? I recommend using scrum to structure your job search. A job search is complex work, full of unknown unknowns. That’s exactly the sort of work that scrum is good for. Additionally, using scrum and related agile techniques to structure your job search will grow your agile knowledge and skills. Here are a few thoughts on how to use scrum to support your agile job search.
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Here’s an overview of one approach to doing strategic planning in a scaled-up scrum environment. We’ll use twelve weeks as our planning horizon, though the approach works fine for shorter periods as well. We’ll start by looking at how a single team could plan for such a time horizon on their own without considering the broader organizational context, and build up from there.
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Photo by Nick Wright
Now that we’ve examined the history of daily scrum, we can shed some light on common anti-patterns of the event. Many of these are relics from Scrum Guides past: like scrum, the Guide inspects and adapts for continuous improvement. In other words, if you’re still following practices from an older Scrum Guide, you may be doing your team a disservice.
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