Alternative Agile Retrospective: Work Is Important but Feelings Too
A different, visual and creative way to run your Retrospective meeting
I am writing this article because recently I felt very inspired and engaged during one of the last Retrospective run by my team. Considering that in these last months we have spent more time than usual on video calls and meetings, I think it might be interesting to read about how to involve your team during a meeting, get good results and having fun too.
I’m sure that most of you already know what Retrospective is, an opportunity for the team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements. Some people call it Sprint Retrospective because they consider it part of the SCRUM Methodology but personally I think it does not matter if you follow Scrum, Kanban or any other way of working. It is a meeting where the whole team discuss about the last period (1 week, 2 weeks or it can also be daily) covering these main topics:
- What went well
- What could be improved
- What will we commit to improve in the next period of time
Usually the team uses a whiteboard, draws some columns on it one for each category, and people write their thoughts about the last period on some sticky notes. The outcome consists in some Actions that the team will implement in the next period providing a formal opportunity to focus on inspection and adaptation. We need to improve these things, how ? Through these Actions.
Let me show you a quick basic example of a whiteboard that you can use:
Very straightforward, isn’t it?
The left column represents what went well, the column in the middle what could be improved and then we have a column for the Actions.
Though for some companies this meeting might be too work related, focusing mainly on product quality and development without giving enough space and voice to people’s feelings. Let’s take some lines from Scrum.org for example:
During each Sprint Retrospective, the Scrum Team plans ways to increase product quality by improving work processes or adapting the definition of “Done” if appropriate and not in conflict with product or organizational standards.
Obviously we want to work better, releasing features to stakeholders with less bugs and any other thing related to our product. We are payed for it right ? In fact I am suggesting to give importance to these things AND to the team’s health, people’s feelings, and yes it can be done during this meeting.
I will show you one of our recent Retrospecitve and will describe each section of it
First part: Draw a face that represents how you feel about the last 2 weeks
Best way to start, asking how people feel through a gamification of it.
I’m the one at top right, MP, feeling happy, geek/inspired because in the last weeks I have been working on tickets regarding the replatform of many screens of our product using a new architecture which is a mix of MVVM and MVI (again..geek).
My colleagues felt happy too, cause everyone accomplished things and put many bricks together, and tired. This last one mainly because working from home has pros and cons, one cons is the amount of screen time. Something to consider and improve.
Part 2: “O Captain! My Captain” How are we doing ?
In this part we focus on our goal and how we are performing. There are 4 sections:
- Goal/Vision: What we want to achieve, what is our mission and our priorities
- Wind/Helping team: What is helping us to work better, what are we enjoying, what are our strengths as a team
- Rock/Risks: What could stop us in our journey ? And then how can we avoid it ?
- Anchor/Slowing down: What is slowing us down ? Do we have blockers ? External Dependencies ? Can we work in a different way ?
In order to facilitate this part we put a note on each corner, one for each section and with a different colour(Goal/Vision, Wind, Rock and Anchor). Every team member writes some notes for each section, in this way it will be easier to discuss and divide each topic.
I have put some sticky notes to show you as an example, I could not use the real ones because they might be related to company business. In a real scenario you will end up having more notes on it, so in order to saving time and cover all of them I suggest to group them. You will find out that most of them are about the same or similar topic, so it’s easy to group notes and create categories.
For example I have found two categories (green colour) and wrote some Actions. One was about the lack of knowledge and team not enough T shape, so I wrote an action for it “Organize a video club about mobbing” with the name at the end of who will own this action. If you are wondering what that action means, we have video clubs regularly where we watch a video all together about a specific topic that we want to learn or improve as a team (TDD, Mobbing etc..). So because many tickets on this board where about becoming more t shape, mobbing could be an approach to solve this problem and something that we could try.
3 Dots vote
In a real scenario you will have many tickets on your board and it’s not possible to take all of them in consideration and write actions for all of them. In fact with Actions we mean something that we can try in the next period of time before the next Retrospective (in our case it means in the next week or two). So a good technique is to give 3 dots to each member and vote the topics (categories) more important for the team. Once that you decided them then you will write some actions in order to solve and improve these specific topics.
Conclusion
Google is full of ideas about alternative ways to run your Retrospective meeting in order to make it more fun and involve your team. We took inspiration for this one as well and I appreciated the outcome that we got from it that I decided to write about it and share.
This was my point of view about Retrospective, I am sure that other people have a different one and that’s absolutely right. In fact every team should adapt its meetings and way of working in a way that fits for them. I hope this article has inspired you and that you will try something different in the next weeks and that you will have fun.
I want to thank my colleague John Atkinson that found this idea (Boat, wind etc..) and shared with us, it’s been super funny and very constructive :)
