An Effective Format for Retrospectives
Change is good. That’s what we always say right? On this occasion it really was. Recently a new member of an engineering team brought with them from their previous organisation some great alternative ideas for agile approaches. One in particular was the format of their retrospective.
It goes like this:
The scrum team are all present.
There are two sets of post-it notes, each of a different colour, it’s agreed what colour is for good and what colour is for bad.
The team collectively set about writing one point per post-it what they feel was good and/or bad about the iteration they’ve just completed.
Each team member then gets a chance to stand up in front of the team and read out their notes, elaborating when either prompted or just when they feel like it, and stick them on a board.
When everyone has had their turn, the post-its are categorised into topics and grouped together.
It’s very easy to see what was good about the iteration, but also what was bad.
Then team members each have three votes for improvement which they can add to whatever post-it, or its, they choose.
The votes are tallied and the two topics (either grouped or individual) with the highest amount of votes are turned into backlog items for the next iteration. Of course if there are other negatives that can be easily addressed they are not excluded.
We’ve found this format to be very successful. The structured approach means we easily fit into the time box for the meeting. Every team member gets their chance to praise what they liked, or vent their frustration over what they didn’t; it’s actually quite a good bonding session. The focus on the big negatives means they never fester and are addressed promptly, so the team is continually improving.
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February 26, 2010 at 11:32 am
[...] the room calling people out by name can have mixed results. After reading a recent article on effective retrospective formats, I decided to take a moment and write my take on finding every [...]
Everyone Has a Voice in Retrospectives | Scrumology
March 2, 2010 at 3:46 am
There are a lot of good tricks regarding retrospectives but my biggest problem with retros is usually addressed by none of them.
As far as everyone is willing to share their honest opinion about good and bad things the form of the retrospective can just make the process smoother and polish outcome a bit. The issue appears when you face the team where a half of the people aren’t engaged. They don’t believe in retro value or they have no idea what had been good and what had been wrong or they just don’t care.
The trick with colorful sticky notes is cool and I’ll definitely give it a try but it doesn’t really solve the issue of inactive team members.
Pawel Brodzinski
March 2, 2010 at 10:15 am
I too have had several problems in the past with team member’s engagement, especially during transitionary periods.
The most significant part of this exercise is to act on the negatives in a structured way. Once they realise they have an influence team members very quickly engage.
If you have certain team members who struggle to adopt your process then the problem may not be the process but the individual(s). The most important thing is to root out what’s wrong as quickly as possible. It may well be unrelated.
One thing I will highlight is people love to have their say and given the chance in the right environment they will either be complimentary or (perhaps more likely) have a good grumble.
In my experience the less engaged or less vocal team members write more and more post-its very quickly. While another member is talking the rest are reminded of issues during the sprint and you’ll notice frantic scribbling on more post-its during the session.
We know agile exposes problems and this format is brilliant at speeding that up.
AndrewOnAgile
March 2, 2010 at 7:21 pm
I really hope there are a lot more blogs entries like this one your site; we need to get the artists out there.
randy
March 5, 2010 at 12:45 am