Planning your next agile retrospective? Start with a random plan, change it to fit the team's situation, print it and share the URL. Or browse around for new ideas!
Categorize stories in 2 dimensions to identify boring ones Source: Wayne D. Grant
Draw a big square and divide it into 2 columns. Label them 'Interesting' and 'Dull'. Let the team write down everything they did last iteration on stickies and put it into the appropriate column. Have them add a rough estimate of how long it took on each of their own stickies. Now add a horizontal line so that your square has 4 quadrants. Label the top row 'Short' (took hours) and the bottom row 'Long' (took days). Rearrange the stickies in each column. The long and dull stories are now nicely grouped to 'attack' in subsequent phases.
Group discussion with varying subsets of participants Source: Diana Larsen
Place at least 4 and at most 6 chairs in a row so that they face the group. Explain the rules:
Take a bench seat when you want to contribute to the discussion
One seat must always be empty
When the last seat is taken, someone else must leave and return to the audience
Get everything going by sitting on the 'bench' and wondering aloud about something you learned in the previous phase until someone joins. End the activity when discussion dies down. This is a variant of 'Fish Bowl'. It's suited for groups of 10-25 people.
Create actions based on how much control the team has to carry them out Source: Diana Larsen who adapted it from 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' by Stephen Covey and Circle of Influence and Concern' by Jim Bullock
Prepare a flip chart with 3 concentric circles, each big enough to put stickies in. Label them 'Team controls - Direct action', 'Team influences - Persuasive/recommending action' and 'The soup - Response action', from innermost to outermost circle respectively. ('The soup' denotes the wider system the team is embedded into.) Take your insights from the last phase and put them in the appropriate circle. The participants write down possible actions in pairs of two. Encourage them to concentrate on issues in their circle of influence. The pairs post their action plans next to the respective issue and read it out loud. Agree on which plans to try (via discussion, majority vote, dot voting, ...)
How does your left neighbour feel about the retrospective Source: Inspired by Fabián Lewkowicz
Ask each team member to guess if their left neighbour thinks this retrospective was a good use of their time and why. Their neighbour confirms or corrects their guess.
If you have set the stage with activity #108, make sure to go around the other direction this time.
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.
