Retrospectives

Retrospectives are one of my favorite Scrum ceremonies.

Retrospectives are powerful to identify opportunities for improvement. Team members get to talk about their feelings and it usually gives a very good indication of the team morale. I have used it not only for sprints, but also when projects are done regardless of whether they used Scrum or not. I have used “Retrospectives” in favor of the typical “Lessons Learnt” artifact that is needed for Program/Project Management.

Here are two formats that I used:

1. “What went well”, “What can we do better”,  Action items

2. I used this format at the end of a project completion when the participants are from different teams and have not interacted with each other too closely/often.
3. If there are a large number of participants (typically more than 6), in order to save time during the meeting create a gsheet/spreadsheet or wiki  or any other collaboration tool prior to the meeting and have the participants add their feedback.
4. You can also share this with participants that cannot join the meeting so they also get a chance to share their feedback.

2. “Glad”, “Sad”, “Mad”, Action items

1. Used this format for Sprint retrospectives. Used the first format as well however, felt teams were more participative in this format and were able to share their feelings.
2. Give the participants post-it notes and ask them to jot them down on post-its.
3. Create “Glad”, “Sad”, “Mad” columns on the white board and have the participants stick their post-its in those columns.
4. If your scrum team is distributed, then you would have to do this online. If they are co-located, yes it would be easier to have them enter their inputs online, however my personal experience has been that if we use post-its and/or white boards, team members are far more engaged without being distracted with their laptops.

Process

Regardless of the above two formats, the process is the same and here is what I typically do:

1. If its a project retrospective or the first retrospective you are doing with the team, then start off saying that the intent is not to find who to blame but the intent is to identify opportunities for improvement. It is important for the team to feel comfortable to share their honest feedback without the fear of any repercussions.
2. Give ~10 minutes at the start of the meeting for the team to jot down their thoughts either online or on post-its/white board.
3. Once everyone has jotted down their inputs ask the team members to vote both for the positives and the negatives.
4. Once voting is done, read through the positives or ask the person that added the positive item to elaborate on that if they want to. This starts off on a positive note.
5. Then go through the areas of improvement. Start with the top three that have the most votes as the areas of improvement. Brainstorm and come up with concrete action items to fix/improve.
6. Add these action items to the product/project backlog if it is a Sprint retrospective.
7. If it is a project retrospective add them to the project task list.
8. Assign owners to the action items and timelines.
9. It is very important to act on these action items. If you have retrospectives for the sake of it and not take action, then the team will not value the retrospectives.
10. Another important thing is to go through the room and ask each and every one if they have anything else to share. Typically the quiet ones only speak up only when asked {I am one of those} and there are times when I have heard great feedback from them when asked. So be cognizant of the introverts on the team and ensure they have an opportunity to speak.
11. Appreciate everyone for their constructive feedback.

Here is a great example to illustrate the power of retrospectives.  One of my  teams have been following the Scrum methodology for ~9 months and complained that there were too many meetings.  Their suggestion was to do away with retrospectives as they were not finding too much value out of it. Once that feedback was provided, I created a consolidated list of all the changes we have implemented based on the retrospectives and shared with the team. I personally was very impressed about how far we have come. I honored their request and did not schedule any retrospectives for ~3 months. Very soon team velocity decreased and team was not sure why and the team asked for a retrospective. That was a proud moment for me 🙂

Since then team decided to have retrospectives every alternate sprint instead of completely getting rid of them. They realized the value of it and have been adhering to the retrospectives since then. Had I not honored their request and stopped retrospectives, they would have never realized the value. People over processes – ALWAYS.