Agile Ceremonies in L&D
What agile ceremonies should your instructional design team perform?
As Scrum Master/Team Coach, I’m responsible for facilitating these meetings, so I thought I’d provide a quick walk through of some common agile ceremonies.
Quick clarification on terms - for my team, a Program Increment (PI) is a quarter, and an iteration is two weeks.
Team Syncs - Sometimes called daily standups, this is a place for a team to quickly check-in, walk the board, socialize new work, offer support or ask for help, and review any new requests.
Demos - Every iteration, the team should celebrate with a show and tell. Showcase work that got moved to done in the last iteration, or significant progress that you made.
Backlog Refinement - Periodically teams should be grooming their backlog so that nothing goes overlooked. Our leaders do this at a feature level, and individual contributors do this at a story level.
PI/Iteration Planning - These are where teams align on what work they will tackle each PI or iteration. It’s a commitment to the priorities for that block of time.
Retros - At the end of each PI, our team performs a retro that results in action items for us and our leaders. We discuss what went well, how we could perform better, and what we need to succeed.
Agile ceremonies help teams run smoothly. I like predictability in my work place, and these contribute to that stability.
Each team should reflect on how these different ceremonies could enable their teams to succeed and adapt them to suit their context - I do not believe in one size fits all.
I hope this post was helpful for folks who lead agile instructional design teams or anyone curious about what this approach looks like!
