Facilitation Techniques for Agile Meetings and Ceremonies
Facilitation is the art of leading people through processes toward agreed-upon outcomes in a manner that encourages participation, ownership, and creativity from all involved. So how do you take this definition and turn it into facilitating powerful meetings? Most agile practitioners can read about facilitation and the “right” way to do it. However, it can be challenging to take that book knowledge and feel comfortable facilitating agile meetings and ceremonies. Whether you are looking to coach a single team/product or scale agile to the program/enterprise, Darrin London says that facilitation is a foundational element needed to truly unlock the creativity and collaborative spirit of individuals working together to achieve high performance. To aid in your agile journey, Darrin explores the definition of facilitation and goes through each element to discuss its meaning and identify potential challenges with its implementation. He discusses examples of facilitation practices that ScrumMasters and agile coaches can use on their projects in either a single or multi-team environment.
Darrin London has spent more than eleven years supporting software delivery projects within various public sector clients including the U.S Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Justice. Darrin has experience mentoring/coaching agile teams as well as government management in their adoption of the agile mindset and agile practices. His agile journey has focused on experiences with facilitating agile ceremonies, developing user stories, and scaling agile at the program level. Darrin’s background includes roles as a program/project manager, portfolio manager, business analyst, and developer. As a certified ICAgile trainer, Darrin facilitates the agile fundamentals training for clients and colleagues through a two-day, highly collaborative course.