Christmas Retrospective – Pass the Parcel

Tis the season to be jolly..fa la la la laaaa, laaa la la la!

It is certainly starting to feel like Christmas now and it makes me want to do really fun things.   Christmas is my absolute favourite as everyone is happy and everything is twinkly and sparkly.

At the weekend I went festive wreath making and I really enjoyed it. Thank you to my good friend Lois who bought me this activity as a treat.

In other news,  a few of us were hosting a festive guild last week and we decided to bring back the party classic pass the parcel.

The premise being we wrap loads of cool prizes with questions and then press play on spotify   

We wrapped:

• Haribos (Veggie and none veggie)
• Big ole bar of diary milk
• 2 packs of planning poker cards
• Barefoot everyday coaching cards
• Turn the ship around book

The questions were themed around the Agile Guild and how we could make it better. They were:

• What could we help you with, for you to be able to attend Agile Guild sessions?
• Are the sessions too frequent?
• Is there a better way we could communicate information on the Agile guild sessions out to you?
• If you could choose a topic for a guild session in the new year, what would it be and why?
• What can we do to make the Agile Guild better?

To add more complexity my client is split across two sites and so we had to be really creative and have the same parcels in both locations and co-ordinate the music. It all got very rowdy, which is my favourite type of session.

All in all everyone seemed to have fun, and who doesn’t like getting a prize Thomas even said this was the best guild ever!

The fun didn’t stop there though.  We threw in an Agile quiz for good measures..even I struggled to answer some of the Scrum ones!  There was two questions in particular that made the group kick off and we had to cool their boots   Maybe another guild session to answer those bad boys! I think it’s more to do with the phrasing than anything.

So a quick and simple idea that you can play with your teams that is different to the ‘normal’ retrospectives. You don’t have to have flashy prizes, simples sweet treats will do.

Merry Christmas Everyone.