Agile teams and Positive psychology

Imagine a retrospective taking place, and a team member expresses gratitude towards one of the colleagues for helping out. The colleague most probably communicates back in a positive way (verbally or non-verbally). After a short silence, there is a good chance someone else will also express their own gratitude towards others. Positive emotions spread trough a team by creating chains of events that carry positive meaning for others. In psychology, this is called “upwards spiral”.

Now imagine a completely different situation, where a team member brings negativity in a discussion or work. Just as example, imagine a person finger pointing others without argumentation. This could quite easily reverberate through others and result in a series of negative events. In psychology this is “downwards spiral”.

Emotions are contagious.

Emotions are also very much related to project success. Different emotions bring different kind of action urges, and therefore lead to different project results. 

In the end, emotions create an atmosphere and culture around us.

Even though positive emotions are subtle by their nature, they are also extremely powerful. 

“Positive psychology”, also sometimes referred to as “Science of happiness”, is a pretty new domain in psychology and is basically the scientific study of positive human functioning. For all interested in this I recommend everything written by Barbara Fredrickson and her very successful coursera course on this topic https://www.coursera.org/learn/positive-psychology.

I find so much common between topics of her research and Scrum values, and I think agile teams and practices can take so much from this science.

We can learn how to recognise upwards and downwards spirals, and how individuals can influence these currents. We can learn how to build resilience in risky project situations, and how to bounce back to track even if there is a failure. We can also learn how to measure positivity and what are desired measures for flourishing teams.

Opportunities for growing positivity are there, but easy to miss, and to learn about them we need to get in the game. There are so many games available in agile community, and I think we can use many of them for positivity growth. Anyone else interested in this research?

Retrospective workshop facilitators guide

Recently I’ve held a workshop for World retrospective day http://worldretroday.com @Novi Sad location, as part of the Agile Coaching Serbia initiative to join this worldwide event.

It was the second time I held this workshop, and we are planning to organise it for the 3rd time soon. Below you can find instructions, in case you want to facilitate similar event yourself. The main purpose of the workshop is to raise awareness with the participants on how important retrospectives are, and also to teach them activities and games that can be used for different retrospectives phases.

The workshop is about retrospectives, but game that was used for simulation of the project iterations is “Ball point game” by Boris Gloger https://scrumology.com/from-the-archives-the-ball-point-game/.

The goal of this interesting and fun game is to get as many balls through the team as possible within two minutes.

Rule subset of the game that we used in this workshop is:

• Everyone is part of one big team. 
• Each ball must have air-time.
• Each ball must be touched at least once by every team member.
• Balls cannot be passed to your direct neighbour to your immediate left or right.
• Each ball must return to the same person who introduced it into the system.

We played 4 iterations, and after each of the first 3 iterations there was a retrospective, each time based on different activities and games. Most of the workshop time is retrospective time.

As you may already know from the great book "Agile retrospectives, Making good teams great" by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen, there are 5 different phases in a retrospective:

1. Set the stage - helps people focus on the work at hand
2. Gather data - creates a shared picture of what happened
3. Generate insights - creates list of potential experiments and improvements 
4. Decide what to do - time to pick top items and plan what to do
5. Close the retrospective - wrap-up and express appreciation

The stage in the workshop was set only once in the beginning, and there was one closure in the end (for the time of the workshop this was optimal). From the other side, each of 3 retrospectives had their own phases Gather data, Generate insights and Decide what to do. 

Below you can find overview of the workshop activities from the beginning to the end. For the majority of these games detailed instructions can be found in the book “Agile retrospectives, Making good teams great”. For others, http://gamestorming.com is good place to read more details. Few are adapted myself. 


Introduction - 10min:
Introduction to the goals and content of the workshop, retrospectives in general and 5 different stages of retrospectives.

Set the stage phase - 10min:

Team stands in the circle. Each person says in few words one thing that is on their mind. Facilitator holds a box. Everyone who has some concerns not related to the workshop writes it on a piece of paper and puts it in this box. In this way team shifts focus to the workshop and puts worries aside.

Explanation of Ball point game - 5min:

Facilitator explains the rules and makes sure all questions about game are addressed.

Iteration 1 - 40min:

• 2min planning
• 2min iteration (ball point game)
• The rest of the iteration is retrospective (~35min):
• Gather data - Satisfaction histogram (everyone rates their satisfaction with how team played on scale 1-5). Provide visuals of the status for further discussion and analysis (same technique will be used also for the iteration 2).

• Generate insights - Brainstorming in "round robin" fashion. Pass a "talking token" around the circle. Only the person holding token can talk. It's OK to pass when your turn comes. 
• Decide what to do - Prioritise with dots. Each team member needs to put 5 dots next to whichever idea they want. Ideas with most dots win. 
  

Iteration 2 - 40min:

• 2min planning
• 2min iteration (ball point game)
• The rest of the iteration is retrospective (~35min):
• Gather data - Satisfaction histogram (same as in iteration 1). The idea here is to compare this diagram with the satisfaction diagram from previous iteration.
• Generate insights - "Free for all" brainstorming. People call out ideas at random.
• Decide what to do - NUF test. For each idea, people mark on scale 1-5 how they think idea is new, useful or feasible. All marks next to each idea are summed up to get the idea score. Ideas with the highest score win.
  

Iteration 3 - 40min:

• 2min planning
• 2min iteration (ball point game)
• The rest of the iteration is retrospective (~35min):
• Gather data - "prouds & sorries". People think about the iteration, and use stickers in one colour to note positive highlights, and in another colour to mark negative highlights. After that team has discussion about what patterns can be seen in their notes, which prepares them for generating insights. 
  
  
  
• Generate insights - "silent" brainstorming. People have up to 5mins to individually generate and write down ideas. After that "round robin" brainstorming  is used.
• Decide what to do - 100 euro test. Participants imagine situation where they have total of 100 euros to invest in different ideas from previous step. Sum of all money per idea is the idea score. Ideas with the highest score win.
  

Open discussion - 20min:

Initiate open discussion about retrospective activities and games used, pros&cons of each and their comparison. I promise this is the very valuable part :) 

Workshop closure - 10min: 

Team stands in the circle again. Team members appreciate others for helping them, contributing to the team, solving a problem, etc. Offering an appreciation is optional. 

More details for facilitators:

• Number of people - 20 max;
• Materials - Box for putting concerns aside, papers, balls, a big basket for balls, flip chart papers hanged on the wall, plenty of markers and stickers;
• Total time - Approx. 3 hours total.

In every day rush, people often forget how important it is to stop and think about what could be improved. By using 3 retrospectives, the team in this workshop succeeded to improve their results ~1200% :)

Feedback on the workshop was very positive. I hope you can use this guide to hold something similar, or that this post will help you succeed with your projects. 

How to prepare for PSM III exam?

After PSM II certification in May last year, I decided to continue my agile journey, invest additional time and energy in knowledge and practice of Scrum, and to sit for PSM III exam. I am very happy and excited to say that I got successfully certified!

Scrum.org considers PSM III certificate holders to have distinguished knowledge of Scrum, ability to apply Scrum in variety of complex team and organisational situations, and additionally that they can mentor and coach people or teams who are adopting Scrum. So I was very proud to become one of the first 500 PSM III certificate holders worldwide.

When I started with preparation, I found very few useful resources with experiences of people who actually prepared and passed this exam. So if you want to sit for PSM III, I hope this post will help you to navigate more easily.

The official information about duration, type of questions etc can be found here: https://www.scrum.org/professional-scrum-master-iii-certification.

One thing to keep in mind is that somewhere in 2006. assessment family changed from two to three levels, so it may happen that some information you find about PSM II online, now actually apply to PSM III. This is explained in details in the following post: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/introducing-new-psm-assessment-family 

Two links I found useful (although partially outdated) are also clarification on the format of essay questions https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/6377/sample-essay-type-questions-psm-ii#6257, and this one https://webgate.ltd.uk/pass-professional-scrum-master-ii-psm-ii-assessment/. 

What I did for my preparation was a specific mix of activities and situations I encountered, and is not guarantee or receipt for passing the exam. But I hope it can be helpful and give some kind of hint for all of you who wonder where to start and how to organise yourself while preparing.

In the short what I did was:

• Prepared and certified for PSM II first (more about that in my post “How to pass PSM II exam?”)
• Went through Scrum Guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-guide) and Nexus Guide (https://www.scrum.org/resources/nexus-guide) over and over and over again :) Even though they are very light-way, it is surprising that each time you read them you discover something new!
• Practiced all open assessments: Scrum Open, Nexus Open, Product Owner Open, Developer Open (https://www.scrum.org/open-assessments)
• Made sure I perfectly understand all terms from Scrum Glossary (https://www.scrum.org/resources/scrum-glossary) and Scrum Developer Glossary (https://www.scrum.org/resources/professional-scrum-developer-glossary)
• Read ALL books from the list https://www.scrum.org/resources/suggested-reading-professional-scrum-master, and any other source that seemed interesting or right.
• Followed scrum.org blog, and some other blogs I respect such as Mike Cohn’s https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog 
• Got actively involved in local agile communities, attended workshops, exchanged experiences and opinions with different people a lot, also tried to actively help everyone who asked me for an advice.
• Held advanced agile trainings at my workplace for different groups. This was a great experience and it is amazing how much you can learn by teaching others!
• Attended few high quality trainings (Advanced agile course by Alistair Cockburn and Better user stories by Mike Cohn). These specific trainings are no must at all. But my point is that things like this broaden your horizons and help develop critical thinking.
• And more than anything else I invested a lot of effort in trying to apply Scrum in the best possible way in every day work with my teams, and reflect regularly with focus and patience. 

Exam itself is indeed challenging, time is short (especially if English is not your native language) and passing score is high. But with enthusiasm, good preparation and a lot of practice you can succeed! 

For me it was a first attempt and I was successful with score 90%. And it was definitely a very exciting journey to this success :) I strongly recommend to everyone interested in the field of agile coaching to go for it!