Blog

Serious gaming to encourage and nurture an agile mindset, beyond just software and product delivery teams, using jargon-light agility cards.

Scrum and its hybrids are the dominant approaches used by Agile teams today. However, despite Scrum being a seemingly simple framework, many teams struggle to apply Scrum well and fail to achieve the faster delivery of higher value products that are promised. Playing the Practice Spotlight game is a simple way to improve any team's understanding and application of Scrum.

The following blog provides a set of free, downloadable agile coaching cards that can be used by Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters and teams working in many different contexts. These cards have been developed while working outside of software and product development with government Defence teams and I’ve used these cards to teach agility and help develop an agile mind set.

In the second of this Use Cases in Practice series of blog articles, author Roly Stimson discusses how a use case model provides a simple, big, visible picture that provides critical value context, which represents a powerful tool that can be used as part of Scrum sprint reviews to ensure that the team and the stakeholders reflect meaningfully on what has been achieved in the context of the overall solution goals and value, and adjust future work objectives, priorities and plans accordingly.

In the 6th blog of our series, Brian and Ian present the Contract Bridge game played with the Scrum Essential cards. The game is useful wherever there is a perceived boundary between a Scrum Team and its customers.

In the fifth blog post of this series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence an experience report of a team learning and applying the Practice Mapping game. The power of this game is to see inside the mind of others and have useful discussions about the results.

In part three of this blog series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

In this blog article, the authors share the first game that can be played using the Scrum Essential Cards. Use Practice Patience as a great way to perform a holistic retrospective on your Scrum adoption.

IJI has recently had the pleasure of working with Jeff Sutherland on a set of Essence cards that faithfully represent the Scrum Guide. As well as acting as a handy physical, and online glossary, the cards can be used to play games and help us all get better Scrum. In this new blog series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence present a selection of the games you can play using the Scrum practice cards and, in some cases, other cards from Essence itself or from other complementary practices.