Agile?  Buzzword!  Secondly, there is an Agile Florida? What?  I guess Florida isn’t just…

We basically used the 59min scrum format and did 2 iterations with review and retrospective after each. We did reviews as a group and retrospectives with the individual team the first iteration (not sure how well that last part worked). Everyone struggled during that first iteration as is typical with a new team going through the forming-storming parts of team formation.

In the second iteration, the teams quickly went into norming-performing as they saw how the other teams tackled certain issues. The final review and retrospective was done as a group. The teams came up with some very creative ideas.

What worked well:
- we had lots of supplies: cardboard, gluesticks, paperclips, 3×5 cards, post it notes, various colors of pens, Legos (donated by my son who inspected some of the projects later that night)
- we had a posterboard task board for each team where they could apply post-its of stories and tasks they accepted.
- backlog was projected on a wall
- Having multiple product owners / coaches (it was almost 1 per team)
- The product backlog had “just enough” items on it to keep the teams busy without being overwhelming (kn).
- Group Sprint Reviews - from one of my co-facilitators: It seemed to me that the teams upped their performance when they had to show what they did (kn)

What needed improvement:
- should have had a handout or sheet on the wall with all the sprint schedules (i.e., how long was planning, sprint days, reviews, retros
- we needed a big visible timer during each segment. My co-facilitator Ken Nordquist suggested: http://www.online-stopwatch.com/countdown-clock/full-screen/
- first sprint retro did not seem to help the teams much (I think it might have worked better if we did it as a group)
- we ran out of time to retro the entire simulation. Our retro at the end ended up being more of a Q&A session on Scrum. So we didn’t get all the feedback we had hoped on what worked for the audience and what didn’t