Having fun at work – guilty as charged!  I’m always looking for different ways to energize my teams and to have fun at work, especially during Sprint and Agile events.  Here’s a great new game, derived from Chris Sims‘ session at the Global Scrum Gathering, that you can play when conducting your Retrospectives.  My teams loved it!

This Retrospective game uses cards from the board game DiXit (which you’ll need to purchase) and proceeds as follows:

1. Write all the team members names on the whiteboard to keep score.
2. Spread all the cards out so the team can see them.
3. Instruct team members to think of the most important retrospective item that they would like to discuss.
4. Tell all team members to then take one of the cards which they feel best represents their retrospective item (crazy fun pictures on DiXit cards if you’ve never seen them before).
5. Collect unused cards.
6. Tell them to now write a description of their retrospective item on a sticky.
7. Select one person to start.
8. Person selected puts their card where the whole team can see it (card presenter).
9. The other team members look at the card and write on a sticky a description of the retrospective item they feel the card presenter is conveying through the picture.
10. When all are finished step above (may need to time box and disqualify people who cannot come up with anything if taking too long), in round-robin fashion each person guesses what retrospective item/topic the card represents.
11. When all team members (beside card presenter) have voiced their guess then the card presenter tells everyone what their retrospective item was.
12. Team members who guessed correctly score a point on the board.
13. That retrospective item and any other retrospective items that were guessed are put on the board.
14. Steps 8 – 13 proceed for each team member until done.
15. The team is now asked to group like retrospective items and prioritize discussion order of items (maybe by dot voting).
16. The team then discusses the retrospective items in priority order and records action items when necessary.

This game was well-received by the teams and a lot of laughter was generated on the art selection of fellow teammates.  What better way to work then to have fun doing it!