COVID-19 freezed global economy and shut down businesses around the world: from huge plants to barber shops. It also affected Agile Trainers who are not able to run their workshops as they normally do. We were all forced to adapt to the new WFH reality and do it fast. 

ScrumTale online edition

The remote version of ScrumTale was in our backlog for about half a year. We are (and will remain) strong advocates for collocated teams and face-to-face interaction, so this idea has never been our top priority… up until now, when COVID-19 stopped classroom trainings all around the world. 

Agile Trainers have a hard time going through this difficult situation and we wanted to help them to keep delivering valuable support to their customers just like before the pandemic. That is why we decided to digitise ScrumTale and give it away as a free extension bundled with every license type of the game.

Tooling 

Our goal was to create an environment as close to the “offline” ScrumTale as possible. To achieve this, we have reviewed many online tools, which could replace physical board, cards and be used for team collaboration. Miro.com turned out to be the best virtual board for ScrumTale. We chose it for its simplicity, user experience, flexibility and templates support. You are going to need a paid plan to use ScrumTale template, but if you pick a Consultant plan and use Guest Editors feature, you will get a great value for money. 

For video conferencing we are recommending Zoom, which offers great video quality and reasonable pricing options. Thanks to its “breakout room” feature, you can run regular ScrumTale setup for two Scrum teams (up to 17 people) at the same time. It’s quite a challenge for one person to facilitate such a big group, thus we recommend having two facilitators for each session. You could also reduce the number of participants to one Scrum team if you are not an experienced ScrumTale trainer.

You can easily replace Zoom with any other video conferencing tool (like Teams, Slack, Webex, etc.) however, the facilitation of a large setup will be problematic in case the tool lacks a breakout session feature. 

Minimum Viable Product

We’ve spent over a year testing and improving the original version of ScrumTale before we shaped it into a product which you can see now. With the time pressure we had with the online edition, we couldn’t afford the luxury of extensive experimentation phase that we’d love to have. Our priority was to enable Scrum & Agile trainers as soon as possible and give them the possibility to leverage ScrumTale Simulation Game in their remote classes.

 We want to share with you a MVP of ScrumTale Online Edition. We are not proud of it just yet, but we sure believe that if you are a Scrum Trainer, it gives you a lot of business value. In the download section on our website, you can find the Miro template that anyone who owns a ScrumTale Box or any license type can download for free. 

But wait, there’s more! 

We like to think of ScrumTale as learning platform: you can adjust it to the learning objectives of your workshop. This is still valid for the online version – we included some of our favourite extensions (“User Story Mapping”, “Reader Persona” and “Arsund Tales” product  theme) to the Miro template to bring even more value. You can also upload our Miro template to your board and play with it. It’s very easy to change the position of the elements, add new stuff or remove bits you don’t want to use. 

Summary 

Current situation forced us to work remotely, but it doesn’t mean you have to fallback to lecture type of workshops. With ScrumTale you can leverage experiential learning techniques, no matter if you run a classroom or remote training. Just go to our website www.ScrumTale.com and download the Miro template for the online edition if you already own any ScrumTale license or buy your own game box to begin writing a new chapter of your journey with us! 

Happy experimenting!