Learning More from Retrospectives
How do you perform retrospectives? Have you had retrospectives where these three questions are always asked in round robin style?
- What has been positive?
- What has been negative?
- Is there anything we want improve?
If you always do the same thing, you might have lost out on some important experiences that can make your team more effective.
From many experiences with retrospectives, here are some tips I have found to be effective when it comes to learning more, and even having some fun at the same time.
###Try to Follow this general pattern When you perform a retrospective there is usually a pattern you can follow.
- Introduction
- Information gathering
- Grouping and discussion
- conclusion
Have an Introduction to come into the retrospective mentality. This is usually done with a short 5 minute or less activity.
If you have had an retrospective that resulted in some follow ups, you can address them now. You should check if the team is satisfied and regard them as completed. If not you should save them for the grouping and discussion phase.
Then you can go into the information gathering phase. Here you want to collect all problems, obstacles, give creds, and positive feedbacks. This is usually done by having the team members writing post-its that can be presented when they are finished.
The last phase is the grouping and discussion phase. This is when you want to group the information gatheres from the previous phase, and find the most important points you want to follow up and resolve. When you discuss the points you want to end up with something that actively can be done to keep the positive habits or to fix the problems and obstacles. To make sure that follow up is done, you can assign it to someone and put a due date on it.
I usually end the retrospective with having a conclusion. Here you might want to evaluate the retrospective, maybe give compliments to each other, or perhaps ask what the team has learnt.
###Change up the activities Changing up the routines and activities is recommended. Why should you do something else if the team is happy with one specific routine? Well, it’s just that, the routine. You don’t want to get into a routine. I believe that if you do the same thing over and over again, you will get into a mental routine. Ending up with beeing stuck and unable to improve your team further.
Having different activities lets the team look at themselves differently. You will probably end up with finding other views on the team, both negative and positive. Which in turn will lead to other follow ups.
Some great sources of activities are the Retromat and Fun Retrospectives.
###Follow up the follow ups This is very important, you and your team must be confident that the follow ups that the retrospective result in are actually followed up. If you don’t the team looses confidence in the retrospective and you will find it more difficult to become a better team.
If there are some of the problems that are ackward and might even involve you talking to a leader. There is a good ensurance that it is the team that has pinpointed the problem and would like to talk about it and find a solution.