The situation

The agile team was working in a still mostly project-based environment. Over the period of several months, they had created backlog items, both with nice business value and also items to get rid of some technical debt they had piled up, getting to a situation where they had about 125 backlog items, of which only a dozen were estimated and refined, ready for the next 1,5 sprints, "as Scrum prescribes".

We've all heard the stories, or even lived them: a company moves towards self-organising team structures, and there you go, the team should self-organise!

What you usually see is that the teams either freeze or go wild, with a sad manager observing the train wreck, complaining they are not allowed to interfere or saying things like: "See! I knew we shouldn't have given them all of these responsibilities! It's up to the Manager to keep on taking all decisions!".

Open Space Agility (OSA) is a repeatable technique for getting a lasting agile adoption. By focusing on employee engagement, a leader can expect a genuine and lasting agile transformation with much higher employee engagement and more predictable, reliable and repeatable improvement overall. To initiate the OSA process, Open Space is the centerpiece.

In this blog post I share how I recently facilitated a team defining the Theme for their upcoming Open Space. I describe the steps used to create the Theme itself and a supporting paragraph to clarify what they will be working on.

Object of Play

Cross functional teams are a basic building block of high performing agile teams. They are essentially a group of people from different areas of expertise working together to achieve a common goal. The main idea is that the assembly of different skills and knowledge will cultivate innovative solutions. But, just because you group a bunch of people together, it doesn’t mean things will go smoothly.