[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Howdy friend!
If it feels like your team is storming a lot… Might I ask, if there ever was a team kick-off?
When health is concerned, preventing issues altogether is often easier than treating them once they manifest. The same can be said for retrospectives:
“In retrospectives we often make up for the fact that we didn’t have a liftoff”
Either Deborah Hartmann Preuss or Steve Holyer said that to me in a conversation years ago and it still rings true. Very few teams get a proper kick-off and they lose weeks and months of productivity to initial friction. In contrast, a proper kick-off sets a team up for success by laying a solid foundation of agreements and shared understandings. Then the team doesn’t have to spend many a retrospective slowly patching up problems that were completely avoidable.
So, what if you missed the start? You didn’t have a kick-off at the beginning and the project is already underway. Your team is busy patching up cracks in the foundation instead of “clicking”? Well, it’s never too late to reboot with a mid-project kick-off to (re)gain footing.
But wait, what is a kick-off exactly?
You might know them as liftoffs, jump starts, launches or project starts – a meeting at the beginning of a team coming together and starting to work on something. It’s a longer event, lasting from a day up to a week. All the necessary people take part, i.e. the team, the project sponsor and whoever else is needed to provide context and insights. Many kick-offs are off-site to improve focus.
What if I can’t do one?
If you can’t convince the “powers that be” to invest the time, you can still purposefully pick kick-off-ish activities to clarify things such as:
- Help others to work well with each other with User Manual
- Make Expectations explicit
- What is the team contributing to the whole? Value Stream Mapping
- What will help or hinder the initiative? Force Field Analysis
- Create a Working Agreement
- Agree on a Definition of Done
- And a Definition of Ready
- Design your spaces to support your way of working as a team with Room Service
Pick whatever pains the team the most and take it from there. Compensating via retros is the second best thing. Especially for strategic alignment and project goals you really do want kick-offs though, trust me. Typically, the project sponsor (the person who wanted that initiative in the first place and is championing it within the company) does not take part in the retros and that is crucial knowledge and missing context, if it wasn’t laid as a foundation.
Typing this out, I again realize how important kick-offs are to me and how much I want to create a dedicated board or book with activities for this topic. In the meantime, check out
- “Liftoff” by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies. It is excellent!
- And coming to think of it: My own book “Plans for Retrospectives” contains *checks* two plans specifically for newly-formed teams (and three more for teams that are new to agile)
Take a minute:
Has your team or project had a proper kickoff? Is there anything that seems to be missing for the team to gel or to take good decisions regarding their work outcomes? How can you get them what they need?
Wow, I can’t believe we’re almost done with the course. Only two more weeks to go. Yay, you, for sticking with it!
Have a great week,
Corinna
PS: What would you need from a product around kick-offs to best support you in your work?
PS: If you'd rather read this Guide as an ebook, click here. Or go all in and get it as part of the Retromat eBook Bundle at a discount. A purchase also supports Retromat as a whole 🙂