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.

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.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by AndrewOnAgile: New blog post: An Effective Format for Retrospectives, http://bit.ly/cTcXtI #agile #scrum #retrospective…