Closing the Door on Bad Sprint Reviews: Open House at FreshBooks
Do your team demos feel like everyone's just going through the motions? Is it a struggle to get people to show up? Do your sprint reviews serve the needs of everyone other than your team?
As an organization grows and scales, silos inevitably develop. Awareness becomes more difficult, then communication follows, and eventually even empathy for people in other silos becomes a serious challenge.
Reinvigorate the act of sharing by turning your sprint reviews into a team open house! I will walk you through over a year of research, iteration, and experimentation that led FreshBooks away from team demos and toward a successful new model for sharing knowledge.
By the end, you'll know how I enabled this change to happen, and you'll know exactly why. And if you think it's worth doing at your company, you'll know how to approach it too!
Outline/Structure of the Experience Report
Note: details subject to change, though the overall message will not
Stragglers, A/V difficulty, Introduction Buffer (5 minutes)
How do we share our teams' work with other teams, and the rest of the business? (2 minutes)
- Why FreshBooks chose sprint reviews and software demos
- Ways those were successful
- Ways those created new pain
What led FreshBooks to try something different? (5 minutes)
- Observing engagement with the existing meetings
- Comments during team retros and safe conversations
- Identifying which needs were not being met by existing process
What different things did FreshBooks try? (5 minutes)
- Research and information gathering approach
- First attempt: Show & Tell
- Second attempt: Science Fair
- Third attempt: Open House
How did it go? (5 minutes)
- Open House success criteria, and performance against that criteria
- Tradeoffs we embraced, and how to solve that kind of pain
What do I need to do to try an Open House at my company? (5 minutes)
- What signs you can look for to know that current ways of sharing work aren't effective
- How you can make a case to try a similar event
- How you can go ahead and do it, even if you haven't got permission yet
Conclusion and Q&A (5 minutes)
Learning Outcome
Attendees will walk away from this session with the following:
- An understanding of common problems with sprint reviews/software demos
- Why those problems were addressed at FreshBooks with an Open House
- What insights might lead you to go on a similar journey at your company
- How to make that journey shorter and less painful than ours was
Target Audience
Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Leaders in Product Development Organizations
Prerequisites for Attendees
Attendees should be somewhat familiar with classic Scrum rituals, particularly sprint reviews (or "demos").
schedule Submitted 3 years ago
People who liked this proposal, also liked:
-
keyboard_arrow_down
Mishkin Berteig - JIRA is the Worst Possible Choice
90 Mins
Workshop
Intermediate
A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.
NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.
-
keyboard_arrow_down
Joanne Stone - Courageous Agile - Making the Elephant Visible
60 Mins
Talk
Beginner
How much of what we do requires courage to ask for what we need? How many times are you asked to make a team agile and the team or leadership is not ready? What stops teams from speaking up about what is upsetting them? Who has the courage in the room to speak up what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done?
Having the courage can be made easier once you have tools and are willing to be vulnerable to take that first step. Teams that can step into this courage are more successful and more productive.
In this talk, Joanne will explore what is needed in our teams and ourselves to bring the elephant onto the table and into the light for all to see. Once we make the elephant visible it can be addressed.
Using a variety of techniques such as team happiness, team agreement, safety checks, assumptions, clean language, retrospectives and self awareness (conscious leadership) you are able to take that step more courageously.
Courage will start with you and can make a difference to our lives and our teams. Do you want to explore more? Join Joanne.
-
keyboard_arrow_down
Mathura Srinivasan - No Nonsense Guide to Brain Based Agile Coaching
40 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
If you are a coach, your job is to facilitate change in your client’s thinking (beliefs and attitudes), emotions (more mindfulness and resilience) and behavior (creating new habits). Using brain based coaching which is an approach rooted in neuro science, in this talk you will learn the latest insights into how our brains works, and how you can use this knowledge to complement and amplify the principles and practices of Agile coaching to create more effective, powerful, and positive transformational changes for your client.