[This post is part of Corinna’s Guide to Facilitating Retrospectives]
Hiho friend,
so, you might already know the basics and the standard five phases of retrospectives, but just in case you don’t (or if you’d like a refresher), let’s go through them and lay the foundation for the rest of the course:
So, what is a retrospective exactly?
It’s an opportunity to reflect, learn and improve as a team. It is time set aside – outside of day-to-day routine – to reflect on past events and behaviors. In its simplest form you answer three questions:
- What worked well?
- What didn’t work well?
- What are we going to do differently?
In non-agile environments retrospectives are sometimes done after a project is finished as a “post mortem” to derive “lessons learned”. Those tend to be long meetings.
In contrast, in agile environments, a retrospective is short and done often (e.g. 90 minutes at the end of a 2-week sprint). Thus the project is still in progress and you can address issues jeopardizing the project’s success in time, hopefully keeping it on track. Additionally, you get into the habit of reflecting and improving, like a muscle that you train.
In Scrum, retrospectives belong to the cast of regular sprint meetings. In Kanban there’s a variety of ways to “schedule” retrospectives. In Lean, A3’s can serve the same purpose.
Who takes part?
“The team” – whoever that includes in your context. In Scrum it’s usually the whole Scrum team with dev team, PO and SM. If you have a specific topic that includes / affects people from outside the team, invite them to that retrospective to work on a joint solution.
If you are working in a structure that has team leads/managers, it is not uncommon to exclude them hoping it will make it more likely that people speak up. I’m wary of that because these roles typically have to offer a lot of perspective. If your team goes the exclusion route, try to also have retrospectives with them at least quarterly and see what happens.
What does a retrospective look like?
In its simplest form, the relevant people
- meet and engage with others
- talk about stuff and
- agree on some actions (that will hopefully improve the situation).
Usually retrospectives are a little more sophisticated than that. Most follow the five phases suggested in “Agile Retrospectives“ (the quasi standard book on retros):
- Set the stage
Give people time to “arrive” and get into the right mood; Set the goal - Gather data
Help everyone remember; Create a shared pool of information (everybody sees the world differently) - Generate insight
Why did things happen the way they did? Identify patterns; See the big picture - Decide what to do
Pick a few issues to work on and create concrete action plans of how you’ll address them - Close the retrospective
Clarify follow-up; Appreciations; Clear end; How could the retrospectives improve?
You can support each phase with activities to spark ideas and interactions. (That’s what Retromat is for 🙂
What is a retrospective NOT:
- A blame game – Retrospectives are not about ass coverage and assigning blame. In fact, some facilitators start their retrospectives by reading out the “Retrospective Prime Directive“:
“Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”
Focus on what you will do in the future. We’ll come back to this in a later post. - Just another meeting in which talk is cheap but no change follows – If the retrospectives don’t produce concrete actions or if no one ever carries them out afterwards, retrospectives are a waste of time.
Take a minute:
How do the retrospectives you’ve taken part in (or even facilitated) compare to the above? Which of the basics did you already know? What was new?
By the end of this course, we will have covered everything you need to know to run retrospectives that make a positive difference in your team’s work life! I’m really looking forward to it!
PS: Here’s a 1-page summary of retrospectives, should you ever need it – for yourself or to teach others:
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