I have been wanting to share retrospective data lately in the hopes others would share their data back. This is a quick experiment. If people find it useful please comment. I will then execute part two of the exercise.
Retrospective #29232
Background:
The team has been struggling with making hard commitments and hitting them. Additionally, there have been a few projects seeing a higher than normal number of defects. The team has been short staffed and just moved into a new building. Team Members 8.
Constraints:
Being in a new building meant no whiteboards and an unconventional conference room setting. All exercises had to be adjusted accordingly.
I like to give the team a schedule to keep me honest and from preventing overage.
Setting The Stage (5 Mins)
Asked each member of the team member to state whether they hit their commitment with a simple yes or no? Followed by a single word that summed up their week.
- Bugs
- Productive
- Provisioning
- Defects
- Advisor TLC
- Frustrating
- WiFi
Gather Data (30 Mins)
Had the team do Triple Nickels. Created 3 items influenced from what prevented meeting commitments from setting the stage and ask them to talk candidly about them. Note: 3 minutes and then pass (24 minutes plus setup time)
Three items were Defects, Commitment, Pace
Asked the following…
What did we notice? What surprised us? What met expectations? What is missing? What needs more examination?
Generate Insights (15 Mins)
Took the top three things listed from the what needs more examination. Then split teams in two groups of 4 to brain storm items for things that they could do to address the issues.
- Where is time going and what are the consequences
- Where defects come from and how to deal with them better
- Simplest Solution Possible
Decide What To Do (30 Mins)
Had teams take their ideas and write them in the form of stories on index cards as part of the planning game. Had each team prioritize their stories. Then each team read off stories in alternating fashion to eliminate any duplicates. Each team then was asked to task out what was necessary to complete the story for the top three stories and provide a “next action” for any remaining stories.
All stories and tasks were entered in Basecamp Todo list to be executed during next iteration.
Close (10 Mins)
Appreciations were made around the room.
Total Time (90 Mins)
Quick and dirty. Less than optimal, but better than not having a retrospective because there was not a “good place” to execute it.
Nice write-up. Thanks!
You have given me some ideas for improving out teams’ retrospectives. The most significant one being the explicit todo items that result. We don’t always explicitly set out tasks and todo items for our chosen improvements. Sometimes this results in weak attention to the improvements.
Our large team planning day is coming up next week. I’ll get it written up to share too.
That’s quite a ‘conference room’!
We don’t do anything nearly so structured and we don’t do any of those exercises. They sound really good. I’ve never been able to get my team to get beyond the “start/stop/continue” format.
I really like seeing how other people do a retrospective, I like this idea of sharing. I’m afraid if I share ours it will be rather disappointing to others, but I could try!
Interesting idea. I think each posting like this would have great individual value. I do not see how dozens or more such postings could have much collective value without some way to categorize them. Maybe, a natural categorization scheme or set of metadata might emerge later.
What I miss from the ToDos is a success criteria or how the team intends to measure effectiveness. One could try to assess effectiveness afterwards in an ad hoc manner, but committing to how to assess effectiveness ahead of time is kind of like having an acceptance test for software – it focusses the team a bit better and provides a concrete way to tell if the idea is working while they are doing it.
For similar reasons, this posting would seem incomplete until an addendum is added stating to what extent the team fulfilled its ToDos and whether it had the desired effects.