The Journey Line
What is ‘The Journey Line’ about?
It’s an exercise you can use during a kickoff, retrospective, or training. It offers a template to capture all the positive and negative events that occurred during a certain period of time. In a retrospective you can, for example, use the previous sprint as the scope. When you use it during a kickoff as an introduction exercise, the timeline might start on the day someone was born.
What’s the source?
I found this exercise on the website of Luis Goncalves. The example is shown below however origins in Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayed's “Coaching Agile Teams Workshop”.
Duration
30–45 minutes.
How I’ve used it
I used it recently during a Scrum Master Advanced training. Every participant was asked to create a journey line of the Scrum implementation in his/her organization. The idea was to add all the impediments and successes they’ve encountered. This exercise was the warming up for the central theme of the day: Scrum implementation tactics and problems. The journey line everyone created at the beginning of the training was an ideal starting point for this theme. During all the discussions that followed, we could continuously use the journey lines to reflect on all the different experiences.
I haven’t used it yet during a retrospective or kickoff. But because of the positive experience, I will definitely give it a try soon.
What you need
- Flipchart sheets
- Sticky notes
- Markers and pens
- Masking tape for sticking up the result
How to do this
- Give every participant an empty sheet from the flipchart
- Draw the timeline on the x-axis and the positive and negative experiences on the y-axis. I wouldn’t add any other constraints; it’s up to everyone’s creativity to draw their journey line.
- Ask everyone to present their journey line to the entire group and discuss it.
Some examples of the result
As mentioned before, I’ve used it recently to create journey lines of Scrum implementations. Below I’ve added some examples we’ve created during this training.
I hope this blog post inspires you to give this exercise a try yourself. If so, I would really like to hear about your experiences!
Originally published at www.barryovereem.com on December 22, 2014.
