Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group — from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used with Scrum.
In Scrum, each Sprint may be considered a short project. The Liberating Structure “Purpose-to-Practice”(P2P) is a way to start a new project.
So why not use P2P to plan your next Sprint? 😃
Bring the P2P (online) canvas to your next Sprint Planning, and complete the various parts with the upcoming Sprint in mind. ✍️
You can download the free P2P worksheet here.
Here are some examples of questions to consider. Feel free to tweak, or change them, and add other questions.
#️⃣ Purpose:
🤔 What is our Product Goal? How does it connect to the overall purpose of our team?
🤔 What Sprint Goal allows us to move closer to achieving the Product Goal?
🤔 What would a successful Sprint look like?
#️⃣ Principles:
🤔 How do we want to live up to the Scrum values?
🤔 What principle of the Agile Manifesto do we want to pay attention to in particular? Why?
🤔 What principle of the Agile Manifesto do we expect to be challenging? Why?
#️⃣ Participants:
🤔 Who (else) can contribute to achieving our goal and must be included in this Sprint?
🤔 How can we most effectively collaborate with our stakeholders?
🤔 Which of our supporters (managers, leaders, coaches) do we need to include?
#️⃣ Structure:
🤔 How must we organize ourselves to achieve our goal?
🤔 How can we work autonomously as a team, and be integrated into the larger organization simultaneously?
🤔 What structures can we use to promote teamwork (for example, Pair Programming)?
#️⃣ Practices:
🤔 What are we going to do? Which Product Backlog items can we move into the Sprint?
🤔 What product increment(s) do we want to create?
🤔 When do we want to release the first increment?
You don’t have to answer the questions in this order. Use whatever works for you.
Revisit and update the P2P canvas during each Daily Scrum. Use the Sprint Review to explain the result of the Sprint together with your stakeholders, and the Sprint Retrospective to determine what to improve ✅.
If it’s worth repeating, save the existing canvas for future reflection, and create a new canvas for the next Sprint.
Why don’t you give it a try during the next Sprint Planning? 🤷