I recently ran a workshop at work on retrospectives. The intention was to find out the biggest problems teams face and come up with “cures” for them. However we also looked at symptoms of good retrospectives and spent some time sharing tools and techniques that can be applied to add some zing and stop them becoming tired and repetitive. Here’s the output of the session:
In the first exercise we collected everyone’s problems. Groups were asked to choose the biggest problems and these were passed on to the next table who suggested solutions. Below is a list of these “ailments” and their “cures”. I have grouped them where they overlapped between teams.
Ailments and cures
Biased chair / Agenda hijacking
- Feedback to chair and escalate if necessary
- Rotate chair
- Coach chair on “Agile” principles
- Let team choose an un-biased chair
Lack of preparation / Forgetting what’s happened
- Compensate in the meeting by having a good time line (Ed. help everyone remember what happened?)
- Prepare - personal/team log
- Remind participants to think of good and bad points
- Reminder before the meeting
Actions not captured / No obvious record or review of previous retrospective findings
- Next retrospective review actions from last one
- Capture/Document actions & follow up by Scrum Master
- Maintain backlog
- Focus on last sprint only
- Reduce actions to a manageable number
People not speaking up/shy
- Chair/facilitator needs to create the right environment
- Suggest box/amnesty
- Try different games which are more suited to retiring types
Retrospective points not shared with other teams (”Highlight points to share with other teams” on card)
- Rotating facilitators
- Shared retrospective blog
- Retrospective “lurking”
- Cross team collaboration needed
Voting system may result in valid issues not being addressed
- Non-addressed issues get rolled over (& keep votes?)
- Themed retrospectives
- Encourage team to get on well so they empathise more with issues affecting minority
- Vary the retro format (e.g. no voting)
Lack of engagement
- Book samples - try new things
Symptoms of effective retrospectives
The teams were then asked to explain how you know your having good retrospectives:
- Achievable actions
- Reference to past retrospectives during sprint
- Everyone had a chance to give their views
- Actions are carried out
- Positive team vibe
- Lower absence and higher team moral
- Lower recurring problems
- Increased velocity
Tips, tricks and tools
Lastly everyone shared techniques they’d used successfully in retrospectives.
Tips
- Split into small groups to narrow down actions (helps with large teams or with quiet members)
- Use a space without a table
- Have a a backlog of retrospective actions with done / not done next to them
- Write the output on a flip chart and stick it up in the workspace where all can see
- Location, location, location - find a good spaces and mix it up so not always in same place
- Write up the retrospective output including actions and put on a blog/wiki or send round in an email
- Forward-specting - what can we start doing now
Tricks
- Food and treats!
Tools
- Happiness Histogram - get team to rate sprint from 1-5 and plot in a histogram to get a general feel for the mood.
- Use coloured post it notes for mood then group by area (Ed. not sure I’ve got this right)
- XP Radar
- Trade Off Triangle
- Plan of Action Retrospective
- Agile Questionnaire
- Timelines
- Draw a big picture of a ship. Positive events stuck up as wind in it’s sales. Negative events as weight on the anchor
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