Unleash Scrum In Your Organization With Our New Kit
If you’ve been following Barry Overeem and me for a while, you know that we love facilitation at The Liberators. We have always enjoyed bringing groups of people together to discover important patterns and uncover big insights. It’s a bit like archeology. But rather than unearthing historical artifacts, you’re inviting everyone present for an archeological journey into the deeper truths of an organization.
The Covid pandemic didn’t help. For good reasons, it was impossible to bring people together in a room for a long time. So we started work on the Scrum Team Survey to provide teams with opportunities to do this archeology on their own. We also developed a virtual workshop with powerful exercises to augment this process. Thanks to our customers, we were able to test, refine and improve the exercises in this virtual workshop with real teams.
“Thanks to our customers, we were able to test, refine and improve the exercises [..] with real teams.”
So we thought it would be nice to release these exercises as a physical kit on our webshop. We went to work with our designer Wim Wouters and our photographer Lisanne Lentink. This kit allows you to run “organizational archeology” sessions with your teams, and within your organization, without needing to hire external facilitators. Although you can use it with the Scrum Team Survey, this is entirely optional.
Drive Change Across Many Teams With “Panarchy”
The first core exercise in our new kit is based on the Liberating Structure “Panarchy”. We’ve always found this structure useful to analyze entire systems of teams, their supporters, and the impediments they face. It's a great example of systems thinking.
The strength of Panarchy is that it invites groups to explore different levels of their organizational system and to discover how they interact, impede or strengthen each other. The activities that happen on every level are plotted on separate Ecocycles based on how well they are going. This can lead to big insights in groups. For example, teams may discover that a recurring impediment on their level (e.g. lack of automation) is caused by budgetary constraints on a higher level. The potential for big insights is incredible, and we’ve had a ton of fun with it.
However, many facilitators struggle with this structure because it has so many moving parts. So we created “Panarchy for Scrum Teams” to make things easier. It comes with prepared levels and cards for groups to distribute.
We designed “Panarchy for Scrum Teams” with the idea that three groups must be involved: 1) Agile/Scrum teams, 2) their stakeholders, and 3) the supporters around the teams (e.g. leaders, managers, coaches, etc). Each group gets a set of evidence-based factors that contribute to effective teams based on scientific studies. Many of these are the same across the groups but evaluated from their perspective. This is great because it allows teams, stakeholders, and supporters to plot how well factors like “Team Autonomy”, “Shared Learning” and “Stakeholder Collaboration” are going from their perspectives.
If you’ve used the Scrum Team Survey, you’ll recognize that it gives a similar opportunity to evaluate these factors from the perspectives of teams, stakeholders, and supporters. You can use Panarchy with the data you already collected, or you can plot it separately. It’s up to you — we’re just giving you our best tools.
The exercise is flexible. You can focus on the five core factors that we identified as important for effective teams; continuous improvement, stakeholder concern, responsiveness, team autonomy, and management support. You can also include all sub-factors if you have the time. Or you can focus on specific areas, like management support. The cards are nicely color-coded to notice patterns more easily. For example, all factors related to “Team Autonomy” are yellow. So if a lot of yellow tends to appear in one part of the Panarchy, this is certainly something to dig into. A detailed facilitation guide and a virtual version are included.
“It’s up to you — we’re just giving you our best tools.”
The transparency of Panarchy is great. But we ultimately wanted to make it easier to identify big impediments. So in the final step of “Panarchy for Scrum Teams”, teams can mark factors as “Impeded”. This is a strong signal for stakeholders and supporters that their help is needed. These important insights naturally flow into the next core exercise in the kit: “What I Need From You”.
Express Clear Requests For Help With “What I Need From You”
The second core exercise is also based on a Liberating Structure: “What I Need From You”. We find this structure invaluable when driving change across functional levels and groups because it takes vague and unclear commitments out of the equation.
In “What I Need From You”, each group is asked to express as clearly and unambiguously what they need from another group in the room in order to be more effective. This is a great opportunity to pick one of those impediments identified in “Panarchy” and express what is needed. But it can also be something else. The receiving group then unequivocally responds to this request.
WINFY doesn’t require a lot of materials. Our kit comes with a 50–sheet block of tearable request templates. Also included are three big response cards that can be held up. A facilitation guide and a virtual version are also part of the kit.
Find Inspiration In 100+ Quick Tip Cards
The third core exercise is designed to make the transition from impediments to solutions. We know from experience how hard it is to tackle impediments. In particular, teams often struggle to make their improvements actionable enough. So we also included a prepared deck with 100+ Quick Tips for Scrum Teams. The tips are categorized into the factors we also used in Panarchy and in the Scrum Team Survey. So you’ll find Quick Tips to improve “Team Autonomy”, “Release Automation”, and so on.
This was really a crowd-sourced effort. Barry Overeem hosted a dozen meetups to collect and refine super actionable improvements for each factor with our large community of patrons. We refined each action until we felt it was actionable and clear enough to go on a Sprint Backlog. The exercise also includes a tearable 50-slide block of 15% Solutions. This is very helpful to capture how everyone will contribute to the chosen solutions.
If you’ve used the Scrum Team Survey, you will recognize that the Quick Tips also appear there. This deck is a physical version of those tips. We’ve found them super useful as inspiration during “What I Need From You” or to plot them directly on the results from “Panarchy”. You can also use them stand-alone as a stack of inspiration during Sprint Retrospectives. Or you can just use the Quick Tips verbatim. Again; it's up to you — we’re giving you our best ideas.
The deck is huge as you can see in the picture. We color-coded the quick tips by their factor. So all improvements related to “Team Autonomy” are yellow, for example. The deck also comes with a facilitation guide and a virtual version.
What Else?
So with “Panarchy for Scrum Teams”, “What I Need From You for Scrum Teams” and the Quick Tips, we’ve created a pretty solid foundation for your own organizational archeology workshops. There’s more in the kit still:
- Two large full-color banners explain the science behind the factors.
- A tearable 50-sheet block of 15% Solution cards. These are very useful to capture all personal improvement actions that people intend to take at the end of your workshop.
Closing Words
We hope you’re just as excited about our kit as we are. It was really fun to create, test, and refine with our customers and community. It's a great addition to our tool, the Scrum Team Survey, or you can use it stand-alone. Now it's your turn to take our best tools to drive change in your teams and organization.
Our new kit is available here, in a physical or virtual-only version. The physical kit is 135 euros, and the digital-only is half that, so cheaper than the hourly rate of many external facilitators. We ship globally, and usually on the same day as your order.
