The dice game below allows you to to engage introvert/quiet people without calling them out and can be easily adjusted to focus on different aspects. In the example below I combined team building (what do team members think about each other), reminders (are you aware of the team’s velocity, why is this important), some real challenges and fun.
I tried this game last retrospective. The team liked it and we had great outcome from question 7. The team member was surprised how well the team knew him and seemed to care.
Rules
SM selects a person. Then repeat until allotted everyone had a turn or game time is over:
- Selected person rolls the dice (With remote team members use an online dice site on a shared screen)
- Person answers the question with the rolled number in one minute or less
- Team discussion of ten minutes or less
- Current person selects the next person to answer a question
Sample Questions
- What should we do more?
- What do you think the person who selected you wants to do more?
- What kind of task do we estimate worst?
- Pick any other question
- Sing a song
- What frustrates you the most?
- What do you think frustrates the person who selected you the most?
- How can your PM help better?
- Pick any other question
- What is our average velocity?
- What is our sprint capacity in hours? How many hours in a day? How many hours do you code in a day
- What should your PM do different?
The opinions represented in this blog are my own, and not that of my employer or the respective standards organizations that I work with