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Retromat.org – by Corinna Baldauf
Plan-ID:
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Set the stage

Emoticon Project Gauge (#32)

Help team members express their feelings about a project and address root causes early
Source: Andrew Ciccarelli
Prepare a flipchart with faces expressing various emotions such as:
  • shocked / surprised
  • nervous / stressed
  • unempowered / constrained
  • confused
  • happy
  • mad
  • overwhelmed
Let each team member choose how they feel about the project. This is a fun and effective way to surface problems early. You can address them in the subsequent phases.
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Gather data

Roles and Responsibilities (#146)

Clarify expectations and responsibilities for each role on the team
Source: Role-Up
Many conflicts arise from unclear expectations. Talking about individual people can feel like an attack. That’s why this activity focusses on expectations towards roles.

Create a table with one column per role in the team. (Limit it to 7 columns. If there are more than 7 roles, leave out roles that have little conflict.) The rows of the table are: 

  • Role name
  • This role is responsible for …
  • This role is NOT responsible for …
Leave enough space between the bottom rows so that people who aren’t sure whether something is a role’s responsibility have an unofficial inbetween space to post them. Hand out pens, as well as yellow and orange sticky notes.

Ask everyone to write yellow sticky notes listing the responsibilities for each role – 1 responsibility per note. Set a timer for 8 minutes and read the room to see if you can stop early or have to give more time. Post all the sticky notes but don’t discuss them yet.

Repeat this process with the non-responsibilities on orange sticky notes.

The team now dot-vote on which topics they want to talk about. Give enough time to read all the sticky notes and distribute 7 votes.

Start with the topic with the most votes. Invite the people who voted for it to share why they want to talk about it. Try to clarify expectations team members have about a role’s responsibilities. Write down clarifications or agreements the team make. Repeat for the next highest voted topic until time runs out.
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Generate insights

Force Field Analysis (#115)

Analyse the factors that support and hinder a particular initiative
Source: Derek Neighbors, via Joel Edwards
State the topic that the team will explore in depth (deployment processes, peer-programming, Definition of Done, ...). Break the room into groups of 3-4 people each. Give them 5-7 minutes to list all contributing factors, drivers and actions that make up the topic. Go around the room. Each group reads 1 of their sticky notes and puts it up inside the force field until no group has any items left. Cluster or discard duplicates. Repeat the last 2 steps for factors that inhibit or restrain the topic from being successful or being as effective as it could be. Review all posted items. Add any that are missing.

To identify the most influential factors, everybody gets to 4 votes - 2 for contributing factors, 2 for inhibitors. Tally the votes and mark the top 2x2 factors with big arrows. Spend the last 15-20 mins of the session brainstorming ways to increase the top driving factors and decrease the top restraining factors.
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Decide what to do

Merge (#21)

Condense many possible actions down to just two the team will try
Source: Lydia Grawunder & Sebastian Nachtigall
Hand out index cards and markers. Tell everyone to write down the two actions they want to try next iteration - as concretely as possible (SMART). Then everyone pairs up with their neighbor and both together must merge their actions into a single list with two actions. The pairs form groups of 4. Then 8. Now collect every group's two action items and have a vote on the final two.
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Close the retrospective

Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis (#16)

Get concrete feedback on how you facilitated
Source: Agile Retrospectives
Prepare 3 flip chart papers titled 'Helped', 'Hindered', and 'Hypothesis' (suggestions for things to try out). Ask participants to help you grow and improve as a facilitator by writing you sticky notes and signing their initials so that you may ask questions later.
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Retromat contains 127 activities, allowing for 8349005 combinations (25x30x22x22x23+5) and we are constantly adding more.

Created by Corinna Baldauf

Corinna wished for something like Retromat during her Scrummaster years. Eventually she just built it herself in the hope that it would be useful to others, too. Any questions, suggestions or encouragement? You can email her or follow her on Twitter. If you like Retromat you might also like Corinna's blog and her summaries on Wall-Skills.com.

Co-developed by Timon Fiddike

Timon gives Scrum trainings. He mentors advanced scrum masters and advanced product owners. Human, dad, nerd, contact improv & tango dancer. He has used Retromat since 2013 and started to build new features in 2016. You can email him or follow him on Twitter. Photo © Ina Abraham.