How to Run Agile Clinic Effectively

How Agile Clinic can be an effective forum to address team challenges

Recently we organized Agile clinic in our organization. The idea behind the Agile Clinic to provide a platform to teams, scrum masters, product owners and leaders to discuss their challenges/concerns and get some solutions. I had experience of Agile Clinic in my last organization. It was more of bridge call where people to used to join and start discussing. Here we changed the approach little bit. We set up a Miro board. Here we planned some activities to engage people as we were doing this first time.

Clinic

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash

So, we had below few things covered in Miro board –

  • Ice Breaker Activity – This was more of an introduction activity. Here we had several animal icons available on board. People will introduce themselves and call out an animal’s name which they feel matches with their personality. It was a fun activity. We wanted to finish it in 15 mins. But it took around 20 mins and we had to park it after that.
  • Lean Coffee – Next thing we had was the lean coffee. As the idea with lean coffee is to get topics from participant, get voting and have discussion on most voted topics. Here we had 2-3 topics most votes like how to prioritize between regular feature development work and the action items we get from retro. Next topic was what to do get team members attend the daily scrum or other scrum events. We had some interesting discussion on these topics. It was like people were very excited to put their views. Also wanted to understand what the possible solutions for these problems can be. It went on for around 20 mins.
  • Key Takeaways – In this section we took inputs on sticky note about what they learned today ? What is their takeaway from this session ? This was planned for 5 mins.
  • Retro – The last activity we had on Miro was a quick retro. Here we asked participant to put their views, if not some sentences, may be in one or two words about this event. What they liked, what can be improved in upcoming sessions.

Overall, it was a good experience. The response from people was overwhelming. People were looking for such forums from long time and asked us to more such sessions. It was very encouraging for us. The overall event was planned for 60 mins. This time we could justify. Still felt like this time was less. People were very eager to ask their questions and want to share their experience. We got feedback that it was very interactive and informative session.

Hope to have more such events in future and will share here how was the experience. Thank you all.