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17. Smoother Retrospectives with a Kick-Off

[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:

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 🙂

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14. Why vary activities?

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hello friend!

The purpose of Retromat is to help you plan a retrospective that fits your team’s situation. It’s heavily implied that you will vary the activities: this iteration’s retro will have different activities from the next one and the one after that. 

Why, though? Why not always run the same one? After all, I shared the best retrospective for beginners with you. It’s a great multi-purpose retro – why not stick to it? 

First off, you can absolutely do that. There’s no law against always using the same format, especially to become comfortable before moving on. There are teams that hands-down prefer that. Fewer moving parts, everyone knows what’s coming – it does reduce friction while running the retro. 

Having said that, sometimes friction is what you want. Well, not friction per se, but making people stop in their tracks and think about things in a new way. If you keep asking the same questions, you will keep getting the same answers. 

Different activities ask different questions and sometimes even a slight variation can get participants to think about something differently. Switching the point of view or using metaphors can open up the possibility for profound change. Carefully picked activities shine a light on issues that the team was unaware of or shied away from addressing on their own.

Plus, for every team out there that likes to keep things the same, there is also one that gets bored by repetition and asks for a crazy new activity each time. Which kind of team are you facilitating for?

So far, I haven’t really had a team that wanted to always follow the same plan. (Probably because the inner loop stays the same 99% of the time. My retros look like more variation than they actually are in terms of new actions and behaviors I’m asking of the participants during the retro).

If I did have a team that wanted to stick to the same plan, I would fulfill their request as long as they still get value out of their retrospectives. Once that is not the case anymore, I’d announce a change of plans to avoid stagnation.

I’d also negotiate a “for every X retros that we follow your wish, I get 1, where I pick” type of deal so that I don’t die of boredom. But largely, I do see myself as providing a service and will respect the team’s wishes as long as they still address problems and the team improves. 

Take a minute:
What does your team prefer, variety or the familiar?

Next week, we’ll look at Tuckman’s stages and how they can help you tailor retros for your team,

all the best,

Corinna

PS: It is actually a good idea to have a “go-to retro plan”. If I’m asked to facilitate on short notice (usually for a team I don’t know that well), I fall back on two plans that I can facilitate at the drop of a hat.

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 🙂

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13. Following up Action Items – A New Phase

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hi there!

Quick recap: Retrospectives serve a purpose. In the long run, we want to improve and that means trying out things. If all that ever happens is talking and nothing ever changes due to retros, then why do them? Teams quickly learn to resent retros if they never result in change.

Last week we talked about how we can shape action items in a way that increases their chances of getting implemented by the team. This week, it’s about how we can help in the following retrospective.

Story Time! Let me tell you about the team with the best follow-through I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with: Each retro they added all action items and rule changes to a big sheet of flipchart paper. Each item had a “revisit”-date attached to it – the date when the team thought they’d be able to judge the effect (usually 2, 4 or 6 weeks). 

At the beginning of each retro we would go down the list of all open items that had reached their revisit date and inspect them. Did the team do it? Did it work as intended? If yes, rule changes were made permanent and actions crossed off. If not, the items were changed or consciously dropped.

They had continuous improvement down to an art. It was a joy to facilitate their retros. They devoted a huge chunk of time to this process – 20-30 minutes out of 60. That sounds like a lot (it is!) but it worked very well for them. By the time they had analyzed the list, they usually had covered a lot of the things that bugged them anyway.

I’ve never again seen such consistent follow-up. That’s why I suggest to add a new short phase in between in between “Set the Stage” and “Gather Data” (from 5 phases of a retrospective) to replicate this success: Bring the list of last retro’s agreements and find out what happened with them – for about 5 minutes.

This accomplishes several things:

  • It lets the team know that someone cares about what happens, like an accountability partner. (Whenever I remember to, I’ll also ask during the iteration – genuinely curious, not passive-aggressively!)
  • The team and I can spot root causes of low follow-through and work to improve the surrounding conditions

With a mature team, I’ll do this every once in a while. If I think there’s a problematic pattern, I’ll do it more often. I try my damnedest not to be accusing, but if the team consistently does very little of what they agreed to do, that points to an underlying problem. Phase 2 helps us find this out so that we can work on the lack of follow-through.

Take a minute:
How does the team or you keep track of follow-through? Would New Phase 2 makes sense for you?

See you soon,

Corinna

PS: I originally called this new phase “Phase 0” and did it at the very beginning. Other people have independently developed similar concepts (eg Marc Löffler and Judith Andresen) and dubbed it “New Phase 2”. They feel that it’s important to have “Set the Stage” as the very first phase so that participants “arrive”. I’ve come around to their way of thinking. So scratch “Phase 0”, long live “New Phase 2”!

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 🙂

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6. Picking activities – How I plan a retrospective

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hiho,

Today, I’ll share what I do when I sit down to plan a retrospective. This post will focus on picking activities and the next one will be a bit of a mixed bag of “oh, you might also want to consider this”.

Anyway, the first thing I do is look up what activities I used with this team last time and the times before that. My memory is like Swiss cheese so I note down which activities I do with a team for each retro. I don’t want to repeat myself too much or too early so that people stay engaged by new activities. I currently facilitate remote retros and just keep all of the retros for one team in the same big digital board – hey, presto: automatic archive 🙂

If I run the retrospective for more than one team, I tend to reuse a plan once for each team, unless there’s something specific to tailor to a team, either their current situation or their identity. When a team’s name is meaningful, I love to riff off on it. The team name is the name of an art movement? Better believe I bring pics of significant works every time. (Completely unrelated side note: I have weird niche knowledge about Dadaism.) Pokemon? Asterix? I will reference the hell out of these to support a shared identity.

Apart from that, my retrospectives all tend to follow the same basic layout that you’ve already seen in my previous posts:

1) Set the stage

I try to vary the focus e. g. in one retro focusing on feelings, in the next one on the sprint results, next one just for fun, and so on. My check in is often independent of whatever follows after. This is not what I would recommend. If you can make the check-in relate to what follows, that would be better. (But I’m honest here and that includes pointing out things I could improve on.)

1.5) Revisit the action items from last retro

Sometimes I bring back our decisions from the last retro to check whether we implemented them and if so, how our experiments worked out. More on that later in the course.

2) Gather topics

I haven’t worked closely with a team in years, which means that I don’t experience the daily routines of the teams I facilitate retros for. If there is a major disruption, I’ll hear about it but small stuff will pass me by unnoticed. That’s why 99% of the time I will use generic topic gathering activities so that the team can set the agenda.

If a team asks me to focus on a specific topic, I ALWAYS follow that request and will tailor all the activities towards that – up to and including creating new activities.

If you are sitting with your team every day you will likely observe things that prompt you to plan retros to address specific pain points more often than me in my more detached role. For inspiration, you can check out “Plans for Retrospectives”.

3) My Inner Loop

4) Closing

I usually ask about something the participants learned during the retrospective. Occasionally I will ask about how to improve the way I facilitate. When I start facilitating for a team, I will ask about the latter more often.

My inner loop is fixed. For all the other parts I open Retromat (yeah, I really scratched my own itch with that one) and use the arrows to step through the activities in the given phase until I find one that fits. For the “Gather topics” activity I’ll peruse both “Gather Data” and “Generate Insight” because the lines are blurry with those two.

When I’m done, I look at all the activities together. Does the plan as a whole make sense or is there an abrupt change in topic? E.g. I would not start with Amazon Review and then follow it with Movie Critic. 

Above, I’m sharing the retrospectives that I actually run, not the ones I think I should be running. Because I think I should run retros that adhere to the “5 phases” ideal from “Agile Retrospectives”. Yet, my retros have no 1:1 mapping of activities to match these phases: phases 2-3-4 are usually kind of merged without each of them having a specific activity dedicated to them *shrug*

Again, this is due to the fact that in my retros the team set multiple topics. It is what it is. And it has served my teams and me quite well. 

Do the activities fit timewise?

Next, I check that the plan roughly fits into the available time. How long are your team’s retros? 

The shortest retros I ever ran were 30 minutes. That actually worked because it was weekly and there were only 3 people who were quite aligned already.

For the biggest chunk of my facilitator life, I was on a 1 hour schedule for a 2 week sprint. That was always tight. We routinely took 65 minutes and I routinely dropped the closing activity due to time pressure 🙁

Then I moved to a team with 90 minute retros every 2 weeks and that worked much better. At my new workplace it’s 120 minutes once per month which also feels more relaxed and we sometimes finish ahead of time. I don’t think I ever want to go back to less than 90 minutes.

Whatever timeframe you are working with, roughly estimate how long each phase will take and thus how much time you can allot to the inner loop. The Retromat book and the free Retromat Quick Ref flag activities as short, medium or long.

A major factor that determines how much time you need is team size. Most activities take more time the more people are there. I would not attempt a 60 minute retro with a team of 15. With a team of 6 though, 60 minutes are probably fine. (Some teams are more eager to discuss than others, though…)

Okay, let’s make the cut here and see you next week for more things to consider during planning.

Take a minute:
How are you currently picking activities? How do the resulting retros work?

Back in a bit, Corinna

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 🙂

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3. Best Retrospective for Beginners

[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]

Hello again!

Last week, I declared my undying love for Lean Coffee. This week, I’m sharing a concrete retrospective that you can use if you’re looking for a plan to dive in and facilitate your first retro.

Before we get to that, maybe you’re wondering, why I share a specific plan with you? Can’t you just open Retromat and presto: a plan for a retrospective?

Unfortunately, that is a terrible idea. Retromat is random. It combines the activities without any regard of them fitting together and most of them don’t. That is really easy to see for experienced facilitators and almost impossible to realize for beginners. Retromat was never meant for beginners.

Now that I got the disclaimer out of the way, here is my “Given that I know nothing about you or the team’s situation here’s my best shot at a multi-purpose, straightforward to facilitate” retro plan:

A great plan for beginners

(If this is also the first retrospective for your team it’s probably a good idea to explain the purpose of a retrospective and to talk about keeping things confidential. We will cover the latter topic in two weeks.)

Set the Stage:
Positive & True

Why: Create a positive vibe and give everyone an opportunity to speak.
How: Think of a question that is tailored to get a response that is positive, true and about their own experiences, e.g.

  • What have you done really well in the last iteration?
  • What is something that makes you really happy?
  • What nice thing did you do for someone else last iteration?

Introduce the question and give a minute or two of time to think. Then ask your neighbor the question again. After answering, your neighbor asks their neighbor on their other side the same question and so on until everyone has answered and asked.

Everyone gets to participate right away, everyone gets a little boost and we set a positive tone for the retro.

Gather Data + Generate Insight:
Learning Matrix combined with Lean Coffee

Why: Learning Matrix is a great multi-purpose method that has “appreciation for others” built-in. I use it to gather topics and then use Lean Coffee to structure and time box the conversations about these topics.
How: Show a flip chart with 4 quadrants labeled ‘:)’, ‘:(‘, ‘Idea!’, and ‘Appreciation’. Hand out sticky notes.

  • Let team members silently write their ideas for all the quadrants onto sticky notes – 1 thought per note. Encourage them to come up with at least one sticky note per quadrant. This can offset a struggling team going too negative or a passive team avoiding unpleasant truths.
  • Go around the team and let everyone put up their stickies on the flipchart and describe each topic in 1 or 2 sentences. Cluster stickies that are about the same topic.
  • Hand out 3 dots for people to vote on the most important issues, i.e. the ones they’d like to discuss. They can distribute the dots any way they like, i.e. they can put them all on one topic or three different ones and everything in between.
  • Order the stickies according to votes.
  • Say how much time in total you set aside for this phase and then explain the rules:
    “We’ve now got X minutes to talk about the top topics. We’ll start with the topic of highest interest. I’ll set a timer for 10 minutes. When the timer beeps, everyone gives a quick thumbs up or down. Majority of thumbs up: The topic gets another 5 minutes. Majority of thumbs down: Start the next topic with 10 minutes on the clock.”
  • Stop when the overall allotted time is over.

Decide What to Do:
Worked Well, Do Differently 

Why: Keep track of suggested action items
How: In preparation for the retrospective head 2 flip charts with ‘Worked well’ and ‘Do differently next time’ respectively. Write down suggestions for actions that people mention during Lean Coffee. State clearly that these are only suggestions for now. The team will vote on these later.

When all Lean Coffee time is talked up, ask if there are any more suggestions for actions. If so, let them write in silence for a few minutes – 1 idea per sticky note. Let everyone read out their notes and post them to the appropriate category. Lead a short discussion on what the top 20% beneficial ideas are. Hand out 3 dots for people to vote on which action items to try to distribute any way they like. (If you don’t have sticky you can also let people draw dots or lines with a marker.) The top 2 or 3 voted become your action items. Who is going to do them until when?

Closing:
AHA

Why: Share lessons learned and demonstrate the usefulness of retrospectives
How: Throw a soft ball around the team to uncover learning experiences. Give out 1 question at the beginning that people answer when they catch the ball, such as:

  • One thing I learned in this retrospective
  • One thing that surprised me during the retro
  • One thing that makes me hopeful after this retro 

[It’s rare but depending on the question it might uncover events that are bugging people. If any alarm bells go off, clarify immediately and ask if you can follow up outside of the retro if need be.]

In many situations the above plan will result in a nice, effective retrospective for you and your team. If you use Miro as a digital whiteboard, I’ve prepared a Miroboard here that you can copy for free.

You need 90 minutes of time for this plan. It also makes good use of 120 minutes. I can squeeze it into 65 minutes if I have to. 

Take a minute:
Can this plan work for you and your team? Which bits will you adapt for your context and why?

Facilitate a few retros to gain experience and when you run out of ideas, Retromat is always there to help. But please don’t use the first random plan you get! Adapt it to your and your team’s needs. And start out with simpler activities. Do not get overly excited with something like an elaborate superhero retrospective. Give everyone – yourself and the team – time to get familiar with the basic flow, voting mechanisms and such. You want them to be able to focus on the content, the problems they are trying to solve. They can’t do that if they are trying to figure out how a complicated activity works. When in doubt, pick something simple. If it goes well, you can try something more elaborate the next time.

That’s it for now, have a great week,

Corinna

PS: If you’d like some ready-made plans to get started, I wrote “Plans for Retrospectives” for this exact purpose.

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 🙂

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Why I love ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’

... and which popular activities I never use

This week I ran another workshop on retrospectives, during which participants plan a retrospective (usually the first time they are doing that). While I was hopping through the breakout sessions, I got a super specific question: “When do you use ‘Start Stop Continue’ and when do you use ‘I like, I wish (I wonder)‘?” (I had introduced ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’ earlier in the workshop but not ‘Start Stop Continue’.)

To me, that question is very easily answered because I never use ‘Start Stop Continue’. That’s weird right? It’s one of the best known activities out there and I never pick it. Don’t get me wrong, ‘Start Stop Continue’ is not a bad activity. It’s perfectly adequate and will get results. I just know other activities that I think yield even better results so that I never fall back on ‘Start Stop Continue’.

And why is that? Well, when I see ‘Start Stop Continue’ in action, there’s often duplication: topics that appear in both ‘Start’ and ‘Stop’ just differently phrased. But that’s not unique to this activity and also not a big deal. The better question is perhaps why I love ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’ so much more:

To me, both ‘I wish’ and ‘I wonder’ are invitations to raise issues in a way that is non-threatening. It makes it easier to address hard topics without antagonizing someone and thus easier to talk about. There is no such nudge inherent in ‘Start Stop Continue’. And that’s why I find myself picking ‘I like, I wish, I wonder’ a lot.

PS: Another popular activity that I use even less than ‘Start Stop Continue’ is ‘Starfish‘. IMO it leads to soooo much duplication (way more than ‘Start Stop Continue’) to the point that it makes clustering difficult. But it is undoubtedly popular. If you love using ‘Starfish’, what’s the benefit that I’m missing?

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books

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Cause-Effect-Diagrams (#25)

Problems in the real world often have more than one root cause. Worse, the causes tend to be intertwined and reinforcing (aka vicious circles). It’s easy to get caught in circular thinking, unable to begin implementing any changes. A neat way to overcome this are cause-effect-diagrams:

Henrik Kniberg wrote an excellent description on how to create these diagrams. I highly recommend it. In the meantime, here are the instructions in a nutshell:

  • Take a “problem” that’s currently bugging you as the starting node
  • Go up – Try to find the real problem by repeatedly asking “So what?”
    (Your starting node will often turn out to be a midway symptom and not a problem in itself.)
  • Go down – Try to find root causes by repeatedly asking “Why? How come?“
  • You can have more than one cause and/or effect per node and may end up with a complex graph
  • Look out for vicious circles; breaking them should help a lot

I’ve done several diagrams and so far, they’ve always helped me:

  • to better understand how everything is related
  • to discover new effects / causes through the methodic approach
  • to find a starting point for changes, when I was paralyzed before

Groups can use a whiteboard, sticky notes and markers like in the photo.

Actually the diagram in the photo is a good example for finding an unexpected cause (and consequently solution):

Our sys admins had “Lack of visibility – The board doesn’t reflect what we do” as a starting point with “Stress” as its ultimate effect. The unexpected cause turned out to be: “No shared understanding of what tasks a story entails”. Transparency and using the board had been the topic of several retrospective and the aspect of “shared understanding” had never been mentioned before. So instead of coming up with a solution centered around the board, the team committed to daily joint task breakdowns to achieve a shared understanding of the stories. 3 weeks later, that had already solved a number of problems! Hooray, for cause-effect-diagrams and the sys admins 🙂

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books

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Postcards (#42)

[This post was first published in 2012 when Retromat was tiny and new. Seems like a lifetime ago.]

I’m always looking for inspiration for retrospectives e.g. over at Thorsten Kalnin’s or in the retrospectives wiki. Time to give back! This is a format I tried out some time ago: The basic idea is to let the participants describe the issue with a metaphor.

A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible object to represent a less tangible object or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., “Her eyes were glistening jewels.”
(Source: Wikipedia)

There are several ways to have participants come up with metaphors, e.g.

  • “Which movie title would best describe our sprint?”
  • Drawing the sprint as described in this blog entry
  • Or… Choose a postcard as a representative!

There are two reasons to use metaphors in a retrospective:

  1. It gives a shared understanding of someone’s perspective
  2. It can open a path to find new solutions. It’s similar to an approach you sometimes take in math: Say, you have a problem and don’t know how to solve / approach it. Some problems can be transformed into an analoguous form in a different field of mathematics, where it can be solved. Afterwards you transform the solution back to the originating field and have a solution to the original problem. Tada

Enough theory, this is how the session went down:

Situation: The developers and PO were going through a rocky patch back then and I wanted to help them overcome this.

Preperation: I selected about 30 postcards for 5 participants and 2 rounds. For most postcards I had a loose association how they might relate to the topic. On top of that I stacked a few random and / or abstract images for good measure. (Who would have thought my impressive collection of postcards would come in handy for my agile endeavours?) I scattered the postcards all over the room on the floor, so that the participants have to get up and wander about.

Session plan: The postcards were part of the Information Gathering phase:

  • Pick the postcard that best resembles how you see the team right now.
    (No shared postcards. If you’re not fast enough, pick another one.)
  • Write down 3 keywords that describe how you see the team (with regards to the postcard)
  • In turn everyone hangs up their postcard and keywords and explain their choice

Usually you’d only have one round but we had a second round on the question “How would you like the team to be 3 months from now?”

Followed by:

  • Brainwriting: How could we get from the Now-state to the Wish-state?
    (I often do written activities to level the playing field for quieter team members.)
  • Collect all Brainwriting ideas, cluster and dot-vote which 3 suggestions to talk about.
  • Create action items (preferably as SMART goals)

It was the most productive brainwriting session I’ve ever seen.

[This Change Management training gave me the idea with the postcards.]

PS: Need more ideas for retrospectives? Try out my very own Retr-O-Mat 🙂
The Postcards are Activity #42, Brainwriting is Activity #66 and SMART Goals are Activity #13.

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Activities for Checking up on Action Items

There are a lot suggestions for Retromat that I can’t  include. Sometimes because the strict 5-phases format can’t accommodate them. One example: Anja Schwarzpaul developed the  following activities for “the new Phase 2” (that I used to call “Phase 0”) aka “the phase in which you check what happened to last retro’s action items”. So far, there are very few activities for this new phase described out there. That’s why I’m extra excited to have Anja’s permission to share these two with you!

Her reason for coming up with these?

I feel it’s important to analyze successful or completed experiments in at least as much detail as failed or incomplete ones. Success doesn’t just happen. There’s always a reason. Real life success example in my team: The phrasing was clear and concise, leaving little room for misunderstandings and making the item easy to follow.

And here are Anja’s activities in her own words:

Flow Chart

Use a good old fashioned flow chart to dissect a single action item. (Probably scales to 2 or 3 actions). Duration is flexible and largely depends on the number of questions.

Photo courtesy of Anja Schwarzpaul

From a start node, draw an arrow to a decision node labeled “Done?”or “Success?”. Now branch to “yes” and “no” paths along one or more boxes containing questions to be asked. Near the end of the diagram, merge both branches into a final box “Anything else?” and end in a final state.
Follow the path that the team indicates. If the result is ambiguous, use the “no” branch until just before the merge, then the “yes” branch.

You can either display the entire diagram at once or draw it as you go along. I outlined the start and decision nodes with a marker and sketched everything else with a pencil, in real time outlining only the path we used. This allows for adapting the question(s) to the situation.

Possible Questions:

  • Why did / didn’t it work?
  • How did / didn’t it work?
  • What could we have done to make it work?
  • What does it do for us as a team?
  • Is this something we can use / try again…
  • on a regular basis?
  • in a different context?
  • at some point in the future? (for non-continuous activities, e.g. release estimation)

Improve the Improvement

Suitable for 2 or more action items. Duration depends on the number of items and questions.

Write each hypothesis / item / experiment on a large-ish index card or sticky note. Lay them out on the table or stick them to a wall or board. Let the team rank them from most to least successful, top to bottom. Now ask a few strong questions to help the team analyze the outcome of the experiments. The goal is to get some general ideas of why and how experiments work, and put these ideas to use during the “decide what to do” stage, thus improving the improvement.

Possible Questions: What would have had to happen in order to…

  • make the least successful item come out on top?
  • reverse the order?
  • make all items an equal success?
  • move item <no.> move up a spot?

And maybe:

  • Under which circumstances would you not be able to rank the results?
  • How do you feel about the success to priority ratio?

If I ever have more time (fat chance…) I’ll figure out a good UI to include the new phase in Retromat. Until then, thank you Anja for sharing these with us!

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books

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Activities to say farewell and reminisce in a retrospective

Teams go through stages. They form, clash, perform well, quarrel, perform, and so on. Until they  eventually disband. Tuckman called this stage “Adjourning”.

A while ago, Stephane asked for activities for a retrospective for an adjourning team. Here are some suggestions:

“My team is awesome” would be a great opener.

“Appreciative Inquiry” would also work well, if the questions were tweaked a little to serve the purpose.

If you’ve got a budget to take the team out to eat, “Retrospective Cookies” are an excellent option.

I guess it depends a little on whether you’d rather the team takes away a farewell lesson that they can carry over to the next team or you’d rather let them bask in their team spirit and appreciate each other.

What activities do you recommend for an Adjourning retro?

PS: Did you know there's a Retromat eBook Bundle? Ready-made retrospective plans for beginners and all activities from Retromat for experienced facilitators. Check out the Retromat books