To maintain the theme of accountability and improvement for your team, break the ice with the list of action items from the previous agile retrospective to circle back on their status. The discussion is one thing but if you fail to act on it, you’re just wasting everyone’s time - and probably making things worse. Review the last agile retrospective’s action itemsĪccountability is the most important thing in agile retrospectives. In the massive amount of agile retros we’ve had run in Sprintlio, here are some tips the best facilitators in the world have recommended to supercharge your set the stage: 1. While I heavily suggest that you incorporate team health checks into the beginning of your agile retrospectives, they are by no means assurance that your meeting is going to generate great participation.
These are fantastic quick hitters to get the team to dive in and gather some quantifiable evidence on the health of the team overall so make sure you track these week over week. We call this “ Team Health” and we think it’s the most important insight out of your entire agile retrospective, but many refer to them as temperature checks (freezing, cold, warm, hot), weather patterns (thunderstorm, rain, cloudy, sunshine), or internal NPS scores. The goal of this first phase is to establish an open and enthusiastic ecosystem for the team to be mentally present for ready to reflect and share.Ī common approach is to use a basic maturity model to assess the team’s satisfaction with the last sprint. So if you do not have that book, be sure to buy it today.Advocates of Derby and Larsen’s Agile Retrospectives approach champion the “Set the stage” exercise to get things started. Essentially, all you have are three (or two) columns in a table in shared document and people can add ideas as they pop into their head.įinally, both of these Retrospective frameworks come from the excellent book, Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby. One additional note, both of the frameworks work very well on-line since the structure is very simple. ∆’s: things the group did not like during the last Sprint (or meeting) that they want like to change or eliminate in the next interaction. +’s: things the group liked during the last Sprint (or meeting) that they want to continue in the next interaction.There are also some useful definitions for the terms that should be explained before starting. Offer the participants sixty seconds to write down ideas of things that they liked during the Sprint (or meeting) and things they want to change.Give everyone a pen (or a Sharpie) and a few post-it notes.Label the columns with the symbols “+” and “∆”. Divide a sheet of chart paper into two columns.This frameworks also has four steps which echo the steps of the previous framework. Add: all the things the Scrum Team wants to add to the next Sprint (or meeting) that will make the next interaction better.
Drop: all the things the group wants to drop in the next Sprint (or meeting) that are interfering with their success.Keep: all the things the group wants to keep doing in the next Sprint (or meeting) that are helping them to succeed.
I find giving these definitions before you start to be very helpful so that people know what types of ideas you are looking for.