Agile Teamwork Game
Motivations
This tool helps to get practice working through issues as a team. The aims are:
- Encourage healthy conflict
- Help team members respect each other's perspectives
- Confront how agile manifesto values have to be played out in real situations
- Challenge flexibility of role boundaries
Discussion topics are deliberately delicate. This helps teams get comfortable with acknowledging perspectives and working through disagreements. It addresses the second dysfunction of 'The Five Dysfunctions of a Team' (Fear of Conflict) from an Agile point of view.
Using the Tool/Game
The situations and perspectives are to stimulate discussion. There are no right answers.
The situations are deliberately vague. Different contexts could be imagined around the situations to explore what the team might then do. (For example, consider how attitudes to overtime might change if it were paid a large multiple of a normal hourly rate. Or how frustration at being blocked by another team might change if that team had done favours before.)
If it goes well you could switch to a whiteboard and go through perspectives on real situations the team has faced or is facing.
Access at https://ryandawsonuk.github.io/AgileTeamworkGame/
When/How to Use
The tool has similarities to other exercises based on The Five Dysfunctions, especially those geared towards constructive conflict. Building trust in a team is a pre-requisite for safe conflict. It is at the foundation of the Five Dysfunctions pyramid.
The tool is aimed at Fear of Conflict and not Lack of Trust. To use it effectively you need to be able to create a safe space. For teams that show problematic and personalised conflict or for newly-formed teams it may be best to first try to build rapport with safer team-building exercises or games.
Either bookmark the url or fork it and configure GitHub Pages for your fork under Settings, with no theme and from master.
With a fork you can change script.js to whatever you find most helpful. Also feel free to submit suggestions here or contact me on twitter.
Credits
The design is based on the RandomQuoteMachine by Gordana Minovska. Read more about the making of that on medium