This post provides a comprehensive list of 35 tools for brainstorming and meetings. I liked the way they categorise them and show the evaluation criteria.
I have copied few of them here..
Our Top Recommended Tools for Online Brainstorming and Decision Making in Meetings
After all that, here are the products that stood out from the crowd. We recommend adding one of these to your online meeting toolkit.
We loved the ease of use, attractive design, clarity of the process, and excellent reporting provided by our top recommendaitons.
Both GroupMap and Stormz offer a free trial and a monthly subscription option. Occasional users probably won't experience big differences between these platforms. Both are easy to use and generate really useful results. Lucid Meetings customers should consider Stormz, using our integration to ensure the results from your brainstorming session get stored with your other meeting records.
Powernoodle and MeetingSphere are also excellent choices, especially for enterprises and organizations seeking a product that will support a rich virtual facilitation practice over time. Many of the professional facilitators certified by the IAF swear by MeetingSphere.
Brainstorming in a co-edited document worked better than we expected, and starting with a product everyone already knows how to use eradicated the learning curve. These are also the only viable option for those of you with accessibility requirements. Finally, free is a very good price!
That said, these products were harder to use with large groups, as participants quickly get concerned about writing over each other's contributions. Importantly, these products do nothing to support your process, so all of the organization and facilitation is entirely up to you.
Free collaborative editors are our top-pick for small teams or traditional facilitators who need to prioritize easy technology instead of high-volume replies or any decision reporting support.
Recommended with reservations.
These products support our test process and offer a good alternative to development teams. But they lack the flexibility, power and finesse of our top choices, and didn't provide the reports we were looking for.
Recommended for designers and others managing work visually.
Mural and Miro fully support our process as part of a larger, deluxe visual management platform. Neither platform is free nor lightweight, but both can be an excellent choice for teams who benefit from visual collaboration both during and outside of meetings.
In 2020, Mural is our top pick for online design thinking and visual facilitation.
Check out the rest of the tools
here
Overcoming the false dichotomy of Specialization vs Generalization with Scrum
The link to the original article
Virtually every Team in their first Sprint is confronted with the problem of single-specialization causing work imbalance. What happens? The Product Owner orders the Product Backlog to maximize value. But when the team members are specialized in a single dimension - such as QA, Java development, front-end development - some team members regularly will find themselves with no work related to their area of specialization. Single-specialization inevitably causes work imbalance.
Organizations typically react by applying the following quick-fixes, (1) have people be on more than one team, (2) give additional work to the team, or (3) do work for the next Sprint (e.g. design) or work related to the previous Sprint (e.g. QA). The latter two quick-fixes are easily recognized as they lead to half-done items at the end of the Sprint, often referred to as ‘carry-over’ or ‘spill-over’ work.
Key point: The phrases ‘carry-over’ and ‘spill-over’ are not Scrum. They’re signs of dysfunctional Scrum.
Each of these quick-fixes inhibit well-oiled teams and reinforce responsibility at the level of individual members. For most organizations, Scrum entails a change in teams from individual responsibility (of my area of expertise) to a team-shared responsibility (for all work required to achieve the goal of the Sprint). Scrum makes this explicit by having a role: ‘Team’ – a single role of multiple people, rather than roles of team members.
original post
