Agile Manifesto Retrospectives Questions Cards Released

A new Agile Coaching Tool has been released: The Agile Manifesto Retrospectives Questions Cards. These coaching cards provide powerful questions to inspire your agile retrospectives and keep them valuable and effective. The cards can be downloaded from my webshop.

Many teams do their retrospectives by asking “what went well” and “what should be improved”. Where this might initially give some actions and help you improve, it won’t work for long. The same things will come up, people get bored, and nothing will happen anymore.

Asking questions in retrospectives can work wonders, but the effectiveness depends highly on the questions that are asked. The Agile Manifesto Retrospectives Questions Cards can be used in questions-based Agile Retrospectives to come up with new things to ask the team and revitalize your retrospectives.

Agile Coaches can use these cards to coach people and teams as part of an agile transformation to enable an agile mindset and increase understanding of agile values.

Powerful Agile Questions

Adopting an agile way of working takes much more than implementing an agile framework like Scrum. You need an agile mindset to make it work. Such a mindset should be based on the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. And that’s why I took the manifesto as the foundation for the powerful agile questions.

The card deck has 15 questions for each of the four values of the manifesto, both for the left and right side of the values (it’s “over” so both sides are valuable). Together these questions help to explore and better understand the agile manifesto and apply it within your specific circumstances.

Additionally, there are 12 bonus questions that you can use to help teams to think about their agile journey, and empty cards that you can use to add your own questions. In total there are 78 cards with questions and 3 cards with additional information.

Summing up, these are the categories of questions:

• Individuals and Interactions
• Processes and Tools
• Working Software
• Comprehensive Documentation
• Customer Collaboration
• Contract Negotiation
• Responding to Change
• Following a Plan
• Bonus: Powerful Questions

The questions in these categories come from the many retrospectives that I have facilitated and from my workshops and coaching sessions.

Agile Coaching Tools

The Agile Manifesto Retrospectives Questions Cards are a tool for Scrum masters, agile coaches, and anyone who facilitates agile retrospectives. These cards can be used together with the Agile Retrospective Bingo to recognize unproductive behavior in retrospectives, and with the Agile Retrospective Smells Cards to uncover smells and solve retrospective problems or mitigate their impact. And there’s my best-selling book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives which provides you with many exercises to spice up your agile retrospectives:

Did I tell you these coaching tools come with Free Lifetime Support? Yes, that’s part of the deal when you download an Agile Coaching Tool at BenLinders.com 🙂