I’m giving two half-day workshops, Better ways to Facilitate Remote Retrospectives & Exploring Better ways to Increase Agility, on September 22 at the Better Ways conference in Athens, Greece.

Learn how you can run remote retrospectives, practice online exercises that involve everyone, and gain insight into psychological safety in distributed retrospectives in the workshop Better ways to Facilitate Remote Retrospectives.

Agile Self-assessments – Exploring Better ways to Increase Agility is where you experience how to assess your agility using gamification. You’ll learn how to play games and facilitate coaching exercises that will help you to uncover better ways of working in your teams.

You can book individual or bother workshops (with a discount): Workshops at Better Ways Conference.

Workshop: Better ways to Facilitate Remote Retrospectives

Agile Retrospectives help teams to continuously improve by reflecting to learn what is going well and what can be improved, and to do improvement actions. Retrospective facilitators need to have a toolbox of retrospective exercises and the skills to design and facilitate remote agile retrospectives.

Remote retrospectives pose extra challenges due to not having people in one physical room for the retrospective:

• Recognizing and dealing with retrospective smells or anti-patterns is hard in online meetings (but it can be done!)
• It’s more difficult to foster productive and collaborative behavior and keep everyone involved during the retrospective
• Not physically being together calls for different retrospective exercises and innovative ways to do exercises online
• Psychological safety is a key issue in any retrospective, it’s even more challenging when people collaborate remotely

In the workshop Better ways to Facilitate Remote Retrospectives, we will practice doing remote retrospectives while fostering psychological safety using exercises that keep people involved. We’ll learn how to recognize and deal with smells and foster collaboration toward effective actions as a retrospective outcome.

Target audience

• Retrospective Facilitators
• Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
• Agile (Scrum) Teams
• Agile and Lean Coaches
• Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
• Anybody who is involved in agile retrospectives

The practices in this workshop will help you to get more value from doing remote agile retrospectives.

Learning objectives

What will you get out of this workshop:

• Explore unproductive behavior in retrospectives and learn to recognize retrospective smells or anti-patterns
• Develop your facilitation skills for running remote retrospectives
• Practice different exercises for distributed retrospectives using online tools
• Learn about psychological safety in online meetings and what can be done to keep people involved

All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the ebook Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Bingo, and a copy of the Agile Retrospectives Smells Cards. (value over €30).

Workshop: Agile Self-assessments – Exploring Better ways to Increase Agility

In the workshop Agile Self-assessments – Exploring Better ways to Increase Agility, you will practice games and exercises to explore how agile your teams are and what can be done to increase your agility.

We’ll be playing The Agile Self-Assessment Game, a serious game used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing this game enables professionals to reflect on collaboration and team interworking and engage in the next steps for their agile journey. With this game, professionals can discover how agile they are and what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders.

You’ll learn how to create an “agile map” using an invitation-based gamification approach. A map that inspires you with ideas for increasing your agility and suggestions on where to go next on your agile journey.

In this workshop, you will experience different playing formats of The Agile Self-assessment Game. You’ll hear about the importance of pre-selecting cards to create focused coaching card decks and find out about different exercises that can be used to self-assess and play your agile journey.

The workshop is loaded with examples and suggestions to help you to increase your agility.

Target audience

• Agile (Scrum) Teams.
• Technical (team) leaders and Scrum masters
• Product Owners and Project/Line Managers
• Stakeholders working with agile teams
• Agile and Lean Coaches
• Anybody who is supporting teams in agile transformations

The practices in this workshop will help you to explore your way of working and take the next steps on your agile journey.

Learning objectives

What will you get out of this workshop:

• Explore what agile and agility means and the benefits that they can bring
• Understand the power of engagement and invitation-based agile adoption approaches
• Experience how you can self-assess the agility of teams and organizations
• Play the Agile Self-assessment Game using different playing formats and card decks
• Learn ways for planning and traveling your own agile journey

The workshop Assessing your Agility is based on the Agile Self-assessment Game. All attendees will get a free downloadable copy of the Agile Self-Assessment Game and the ebook ‘The Agile Self-assessment Game’ (value over €30).

Practical information

These are half-day workshops, four-hour in-person interactive workshops.

You can book individual or bother workshops (with a discount): Workshops at Better Ways Conference, or by contacting me by email at [email protected].

Tickets are limited to ensure that all attendees can play the games and get fully involved and engaged.

Cancelations are allowed until one week before the workshop is held. If you can’t attend then a colleague can use your ticket to join.

Tickets

You can buy a ticket for one of the workshops or a combi ticket for both workshops:

• One four-hour workshop: €200 + VAT
• Both workshops, full day of training: €375 + VAT

If you want to attend with two or more persons from the same company, please contact me at [email protected].

Trainer: Ben Linders

Ben Linders runs a one-person business in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, What Drives Quality and Continuous Improvement.

As a trainer, facilitator, coach, and advisor, he helps organizations to improve continuously by applying effective software development and management practices.

Ben is recognized worldwide as an expert practitioner on Agile Retrospectives. He’s a well-respected member of many networks and meetups on Agile Retrospectives and Continuous Improvement, an invited (keynote) speaker at conferences and in-company events, and a renowned trainer and author.

Workshops by Ben Linders

Doing it yourself and reflecting is the way people learn new practices and develop skills in my workshops. They work in teams to try out things and experiment with practices to learn how agile can really look and feel. I coach people, answer questions, share my experience, and provide lots of ideas. They learn from me, and also from each other.

I use many exercises, games, and real-life cases in my workshops. Examples are the retrospectives toolbox, the Impediment Game, and the Agile Self-assessment Game.