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Set the Stage: Understand where everyone is coming from today.Embrace the five stages of a successful retrospectiveĭiana Larsen and Esther Derby’s book Agile Retrospectives – Making Good Teams Great lays out five stages of a successful retro. Here are our 11 top tips to make your retros successful. There are some simple changes you can introduce to vastly improve your retrospectives. If meetings aren’t adding value and actively driving change within the team and the organisation, they aren’t achieving what they set out to achieve, and they need to be stopped or changed. If people stop engaging in the meeting and feel that their time is being wasted, then it probably is. Actions aren’t always followed through effectively, resulting in a sort of Groundhog Day experience that can be very frustrating for all involved. While this makes sense on the surface level, when you look a little closer you often find the same strengths and weaknesses emerging every time. Often, half the people in the retro aren’t really engaged, and some are on their phones. They make lists and group the topics together. The Scrum Master throws some pens and some sticky notes on the table, and the team writes down what went well and what can be improved. Many retrospectives follow the same formula: the team is all gathered in a room around a small table. This is why it is so crucial to get them right.
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Team retros can be a place for learning, problem solving, or having fun and motivating each other. They can be a place to build and enable teams, or to help teams start their journey from the best possible place. When done correctly, retrospectives can be a catalyst for organisational change as well as team change. The aim of a retrospective is to look closely at the processes and products produced during a sprint, discuss these as a team, and decide on a way forward together to drive constant improvement.Ī retrospective is also known as a Scrum retrospective, retrospective meeting, a sprint retrospective, or simply a retro. What is a retrospective?Ī retrospective is a meeting held for the purpose of reflecting on the product development or workflow process. Here are 11 ways to ensure your retrospectives are successful. A retrospective provides the opportunity to look back on the sprint you’ve just completed and make plans to improve in the future. This helps you to constantly iterate and improve your output, methods, processes, and product. Possibly the most important part of your Agile journey is your ability to inspect and adapt. So, that’s just an amazing and simply tool to help you order and communicate your ideas while reflecting about priorities during your retrospectives and post-mortem.By Joanne Perold OctoScrum Master Leave a comment They could be deemed so because of the way the company manages them, or they could be management fads or just good ideas in the wrong context. BOTTOM LEFT: the quadrant includes low-value and high-cost initiatives.BOTTOM RIGHT: suggestions with limited costs, but with marginal value.These are costly Initiatives, you should carefully evaluate, fund, and execute them. TOP LEFT: difficult and costly Initiatives, with a promise of high value delivered when correctly executed.TOP RIGHT: low-hanging fruits: these are hi-value, low-effort easy changes suggestions.The second board has, after discussion, all the ideas prioritized in four Value/Cost quadrants: After a short discussion, we decided to use two criteria: value and cost, and we ended up with the following prioritized board, which I loved.
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This time though, we tried a different approach in order to come up with a ready-to-go next step proposal. Medium priority, prone to cost-cutting activities Should do- The team tries to make the most of them.These are no-negotiable activities that must all be done We usually do it by grouping ideas in buckets, and then we classify them with the MoSCoW method: The board was rich with suggestions, but we needed to find a way to prioritize it. The discussion was fun and interesting and we ended up with the following board. During a retrospective at our Agile Coaching Group, we were brainstorming about being Agile, vs.
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