How to get your Team Pumped for Sprint Planning with Live Multiple Choice Questions
Employee engagement can be tricky to maintain, and with more work than ever to be done in the sprint, getting your team excited about planning their work can seem impossible! But there’s good news: by using live multiple choice questions as an introduction to your sprint planning meeting, you’ll engage your team from the beginning, leaving them all pumped and ready to go before you even get down to business! Here’s how it works.
What is Scrum
Scrum is an agile project management method that breaks work into small pieces and completes them in short cycles. It relies on self-organizing teams, close communication and quick iteration. Scrum is usually done in three phases:
The product backlog: The product backlog is made up of all features desired in the product.
The sprint cycle: A sprint cycle is a set period of time where work gets done on completing each feature.
The retrospective meeting: At the end of each sprint cycle, there is a retrospective meeting where you look back on what went well and what didn't go as planned.
Sprint Planning
A good way to start off the meeting is to have an introduction. This sets the tone of the meeting and it also helps create excitement in the room. After that, you can ask everyone in the room a question or two about what they want out of this project. This could be supported by using an Q&A in your presentation. Then, at the end of this session, everyone will be more engaged because they know exactly what's expected from them. Asking questions is important because it helps people feel like their input matters and it also allows them to take ownership over their tasks. If you're looking for more ways on how to make your meetings engaging and fun, consider using live multiple choice questions] during introductions or before going over goals and objectives.
Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a great way to help generate ideas, keep everyone engaged and collaborate. Doing this with your team using a live word cloud can be used in many ways. One way is as an introduction or warm-up activity before the start of a sprint planning meeting. The leader should provide the participants with a word or topic on which they are all expected to think of words that relate to it. The words that are answered the most will appear bigger on the screen. This way the leader can notice the common answers.
Voting On User Stories
Start by having everyone vote on the most important user stories to tackle first. You can do this using live multiple choice, where you ask the group questions like which of these three stories would you like us to start on? and then have them vote. This will give you an idea of what they want done right off the bat and make it much easier to prioritize which stories need more research or attention.
The Results
One of the most effective ways to start meetings and keep them engaged is by using live multiple choice questions. People enjoy it because they're not just waiting around and they're actively participating in the meeting. Plus, you'll always have at least one person who wants to answer every question. The best part is that the questions can be tailored specifically to the audience. Here are some ideas of what you could ask:
Where was your favorite place to vacation last year?
What's your favorite international destination?
If you had unlimited money, where would you go this summer?
What's your favorite restaurant in town?
The most recent movie from Disney or Dreamworks?
Saskia Zwaak
Saskia started as the first intern on the marketing team and is currently a full time Junior Marketeer. She established the roots to create new blogs with the purpose of creating content to help others. Nonsense content is not up to Saskia’s standards as she only believes in bringing value to her readers.