Over the past few weeks i have been experimenting with ideas to keep the daily scrum fresh interesting and motivating.

Following an entertaining and useful session on “Improv Games” at Agile Manchester i have started to play some of these games with the team. The teams seem a little skeptical but i have enough support from them to try a few out. These are a bit of fun but also have real learnings even if these are not explicit. These can be found at: http://www.teamfirstdevelopment.com/ I recommend trying count to 20 and yes and.

We have also been experimenting with the questions we ask. One change which went down well was changing the blockers question to “What is pissing you off?”. This surfaced a lot of issues which may not have come to light and also allowed the team bond over shared frustrations.

Some haven’t gone so well, Asking what do you want to achieve today and then what do you most want to achieve this week left the team wanting to talk about what they did yesterday and not knowing whether it was allowed. It was allowed!

The goal of all of this is to keep the Scrum/Stand Up fresh meaning we get a more efficient meeting and a more efficient team. The scrum after all is for the team to communicate. I am trying hard to facilitate better conversations.