Update: 12.10.2008. A further presentation is attached "Leuchtfeuer Short.pdf" which describes a little more about our change management approach.

At the German Scrum Open Space conference on 11th July, Christoph Mathis and I presented our ideas on sustainable Enterprise Scrum transitions.

The ideas are based on our experiences leading the successful Scrum transition at Allianz Deutchland over the last 1.5 years and identifies some of the key success factors and pitfalls as well as outlining the approach.

There are many techniques that can be applied during Scrum retrospectives. The excellent book "Agile Retrospectives" by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen has several suggestions. As a Scrum coach I try to keep retrospectives fresh and interesting by using different techniques and I regularly dip into this book for inspiration.

One of the simplest retrospective approaches is to get the team to make three lists:

• Continue - what has worked well and should be continued
• Stop - what has not worked well or has hindered us and should be stopped
• Start - what things have we not been doing which we should start to do

With the support of a facilitator, the team can produce the three lists on three separate flip-chart sheets. However, sometimes the team dynamics makes this difficult, for example if one or more of the team members are very dominant so that other team members are effectively excluded. Brain-writing is one way to help all team members to contribute.

In this article I describe how brain-writing can be applied as part of a Scrum retrospective.

I've updated my German translation of Mike Cohn's Creative Commons Introduction to Scrum slides. Powerpoint and Apple Keynote versions of the slides are attached.