Nienke Alma
Agile Coach, ING, The Netherlands
Nienke Alma is a people oriented Agile enthusiast with special interest in team dynamics and continuous learning. She loves to look for creative ways to keep people moving forward. To reach this goal she often develops new training sessions.
Workshop
INTERACTIVE WORKSHOP DESIGN – HIOW TO GET THE BEST OUT OF YOUR TEAM SESSIONS
Target audience:
Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Agile trainers or other session facilitators
What it is about:
It’s just another day in the office for the Agile Coach when she’s approached by a Product Owner with a request for help. Her team complains about the current Agile way of working and the lack of autonomy they get in applying the Agile principles in their day-to-day work. „Would it be possible to do a „back to basic“ session with the team, so they better understand the intentions of the Agile way of working of their organization?“ the Product Owner asks.
Many Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters or any other team session facilitators will recognize a request like this. Of course you take up the challenge and start preparing. Let’s start with a brief introduction. Then bring in some Agile theory, ask the participants a few questions and have them work on an exercise before you wrap up and hope that your session had the impact the Product Owner expected. Or… you choose a different approach! In this case the Agile Coach decided to go in an opposite direction. The team was asked to define what makes the Agile Way of Working bad, leading to unexpectedly good results.
This example shows that there are many ways to reach a good result in a team session. Unfortunately facilitators do not always realize how may options they have to make a session effective. As a result, sessions get predictable, sometimes even boring, and so do the outcomes of the sessions. But there’s good news: with just a little bit of inspiration and a few tricks everyone is able to think out of the box. The workshop “Interactive workshop design” aims to provide inspiration and tricks. Expect an active session that contains the exchange of war stories, creativity challenges and cases. Do you have the guts to experiment?
Learning outcomes:
A trigger to step out of the box when designing team sessions
Tips and tricks for designing effective and fun team sessions
Inspiration by good and bad practices on team session facilitation shared by an Agile Coach
