Agile Cards: a Fun and Flexible Way to Industrialise and Standardise, 3/3
This is the final part of our three-instalment article.
The Iterations
We picked the practices, described them, and tested the cards in several dry runs, first with selected members of our Scrum Master community, then with everybody all together. At the same time, we prepared different physical prototypes — of various shapes and sizes, text/image layout, elements included. We had to practice what we preached, after all — without this iterative feedback loop, the cards would have no chance of getting buy-in from our own Agilists, not to mention from the wider constituency of our team members and stakeholders.
The challenge of how to prepare many copies of a physical product and getting it distributed was also quite stimulating, especially as it coincided with the breakout of the global pandemic. Many of our community’s members displayed hidden talents and contributed varied knowledge, ranging from the literal copying & pasting of images on prototype cards to navigating the global (UK, Europe-wide) printing press industry… In the end, the production process itself was a great bonding exercise. Nothing gels a team together like the shared sweat of a job well done!
A couple of iterations later, spiced up with the quirky illustrations in Benoît’s unmistakable style, we had a full deck. What can a Pictet collaborator find when they hold the deck in their hands? The cards are grouped into colour-coded series, of varying length, each colour representing a basic category of Agile competency, such as Collaboration or Organisation, through groups of behaviours linked intimately to the major events of an Agile team’s life, to technical topics of Software Craftsmanship. A series of cards in the same category has the same colour and can easily be extracted for a topical retrospective, for example. In a future article, we may explore one of the series in depth.
What’s in a Card?
What catches the eye immediately when looking at the front of a card is, of course, the quirky and inimitable illustration of the practice. Sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, always fun to look at. It’s accompanied by the name of the practice — that’s the bold card title, and by one-sentence which sometimes describes the practice in more detail, and sometimes provides just a supplement or a commentary about it. The top-right contains the card’s color-coded category. And of course, in the bottom-left is the card’s score.
The back of the card repeats the practice name and lists the behaviours that must be observed on the ground for the team to be able to say, “we are doing it”. Finally, each card is adorned with the logos of organisations involved in the whole exercise — Pictet Technologies Luxembourg and Lean & Agile Coaches from Geneva, as well as the indication that the card can be shared under the Creative Commons licence.
How to use the cards?
In the most basic of uses, the deck of cards is an attractive, interesting object that all our collaborators receive on their desks. It piques their curiosity and they usually cannot wait to see what’s inside.
The next obvious application is that the cards are a learning tool. Open the box, flip the cards one-by-one, admire the illustrations, and ingest the Agile knowledge in light, bite-sized chunks.
It’s the more structured use, facilitated by the teams’ Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches that will be more powerful and useful to the teams. We expect all Scrum Masters to use these cards — typically one topical “colour” at a time — as either an icebreaker, or the main course of a retrospective, under the guise of assessing whether a team follows the practices described. The cards, being of a very graphical nature, lend themselves to being put on an online collaboration tool such as Mural, which leads to a tactile and visually rich retrospective experience, at least by the standards of our pandemic times.
We make it very clear from the beginning that the cards are not a one-way street: teams are free to discuss the practices as described, and decide that in their context it makes sense to follow a given practice only partially — or indeed, to “apply for an exception” from following it at all. This exercise achieves a two-way communication, as the collaborators learn what is expected from an Agile team, in the Pictet Group context, and at the same time the management can learn about the particulars of a given team’s situation, and whether they find it easy to follow the practices as prescribed. For off-hand ideas, each deck contains a card for new practice or suggestion to percolate bottom-up from the teams to the community of Scrum Masters or to the management.
Another level opens with the use of the points on the card. We gave each card a numeric value in points on a scale of 5 to 30, representing the relative value of the particular practice to the organisation, its importance in our vision of what an Agile Team should do. The sum of points for all the cards in the deck is 1000. This gives an easy-to-use scale of Agility on which the team can place itself after evaluating the whole deck of cards. It can also enable the team to establish what their weak and strong areas are, when the points of only one colour category are added. More importantly, it makes it possible to establish a baseline of where the team was after the first run through the deck, and then to follow the team’s progress — or perhaps even regression — as the cards are evaluated again and again, during subsequent retrospectives. Finally, we can compare the teams — not their velocity of course, but based on what their strong and weak points are, and how advanced they are in their journey to agility. As the community of Scrum Masters, we get to know which teams need more help, and which may serve as example to others. In the end, this maturity-score approach can be scaled to the whole organisation, giving our management an eagle-eye view of the teams’ landscape.
Does the scoring engender competition between the teams, or put undue pressure on them? In a way, yes, but it’s a healthy competition, because the teams know what they must do to improve, and the fact that it’s mediated by their Scrum Masters ensures that no team will be inclined to take shortcuts or to inflate their score in any way. The only way forward in the teams classification is — by doing the work necessary.
The Cards as a Game
With skilful facilitation by a Scrum Master, it’s even possible to turn the Agile Cards into a game. One way might be to distribute the cards from a deck between team members and ask them to trade them, to see which ones are valued the most and then imagine a team that follows these practices only. How would such a team work? Pit a mock sub-team organized with only a subset of the cards against another, organized with a different subset of the cards and ask the team to list the strong and weak points of each subset, and which sub-set they would actually prefer.
Or you could get inspired by card games such as Magic: The Gathering, and just play the cards against each other, individually, after they are distributed amongst the players. One way for a card to trump another would be just the straight score; but that’s not much better than pure randomness. Instead, with two cards placed on the table by two players, the other team members could discuss and decide, arbitrarily and in their team’s context, which card would be better than this one — and which player wins the exchange. The possibilities are endless!
The Moral of the Story
Today’s Agile coaches and Scrum Masters are overwhelmed with materials from which to draw inspiration: there is a plethora of books, blogs, videos and podcasts. There is also a lively conference scene and plenty of events to learn new tricks, tips and approaches. It’s not a bad reflex to have: when confronted with a new, challenging situation, to reach out in search of people who dealt with similar problems in the past. “We can see further if we stand on the shoulders of giants,” to paraphrase Isaac Newton himself.
On the other hand, in some organisations, over-reliance on authorities and Agile luminaries might lead to a sort of reverse “Not Invented Here” syndrome, where we trust our insights less than already existing solutions, even if the latter don’t fit our needs perfectly. With the Agile Cards, we flexed our innovation muscles and let us tell you — it’s a damn good feeling! Constructing the Agile Cards was not only stimulating on an intellectual level, but it also gave us a deep sense of satisfaction as we watched our own product grow and mature.
In the end, this is a call to you, dear reader — after getting to know our Agile Cards, can you do us one better?
