Another part of the scrum agile framework is the process of continuous improvement, which is great for any team, business, or organisation. A key part of continuous improvement is running retrospectives, a meeting where the team reflects on the work done and finds areas to make improvements to the way the team works. Even more important than running retrospectives is taking action on the output of retrospectives.
What Is a Retrospective?
A retrospective, or ‘retro’ is a meeting where the team gathers physically or virtually and highlights things they would like to talk about – good things that should be appreciated, good processes or actions that they team should continue doing, and things that the team can improve on. There are lots of different format for running the retro, and they are designed to help the team view things from a different perspective and hopefully trigger thoughts that bring insights into the team and how they work.
What should come of out a retro are actions that a team can take to improve – actually in many teams they like to call them experiments, because you don’t know for sure whether taking a particular action will be an improvement, but if you try, you will learn.
Why Should I Run Retrospectives?
A team (or business or organisation) should be always trying to improve. By improve I don’t necessarily mean large wholesale changes, restructuring, etc. Retrospectives are there to make smaller changes to team processes, identify pain points, inefficiencies, and even the way the team members communicate with each other. All of these actions helps the team move forward and improve over time.
However, it requires introspection and openness by everyone in the team. And for this to happen, the team members need to be able to feel safe to speak, without fear of a negative consequence. In some businesses this can be the hard part. But if you want your team, business or organisation to grow, and serve your customers better, then this needs to happen.
How Do You Run a Retrospective?
Step 1 – Preparation
Let’s take it step by step using a simple format.
Before the meeting, setup a board, or a space on the wall with 4 sections; Start, Stop, Continue, and Actions.
You need enough post-it notes for the team to write their feedback on, plus pens or textas to write them.
Step 2 – Starting the Retrospective Meeting
At the start of the meeting, introduce the idea of retros to the team. Be clear on what you will do with the feedback. Try and make them feel assured that they are safe to speak their mind.
The team will need to 15 mins (maybe longer the first time) to write down their thoughts, using the Start, Stop or Continue categories, according to the following guide:
Start: What are some good things the team should start doing? These can be simple things like having a team lunch, a team coffee and cake break, or harder things like a new process, or a new way of doing something.
Stop: What things are detrimental to the customer or the team that they should stop doing?
Continue: What are some of the great things that are being done now that the team want to recognise and continue doing?
The team members should write their ideas onto their post-it notes – one idea per post-it note.
Step 3 – Writing Down Ideas and Putting Them on the Board
After 15 minutes, the team members can, one by one, put their post-it notes onto the board and give a little explanation of each idea. Don’t dismiss anyone’s ideas, and don’t let anyone in the team do it either. If this is someone’s idea, it is important in some way, even if it is a bit awkward to discuss (some things might need to be handled after the meeting, and this is okay).
After everyone has put their ideas up, thank everyone for their input, and summarise a little. Recognise that it might be hard to give feedback, and that each of the ideas are great.
Step 4 – Voting on Actions
Then, the team as a group need to decide what actions they should take out of the ideas. Give them time to discuss, shortlist and vote on which ones they would like to take action on, and put these in the Actions section so it is clear to everyone.
Take photos of the wall and make sure you keep all the post-it notes (when you run these regularly you will be start to see patterns that you can work on). Be clear on first steps for each of the actions, you should also make them visible in the teams room if they are comfortable with that, so that everyone has a regularly reminder of what was agreed, and if the action is on you, they should remind you that the action needs to be worked on.
How Often Should I Run a Retrospective?
Retros should be run regularly – for example in Scrum they are run at the end of each sprint, and each sprint is typically 2-4 weeks. The regular cadence helps to check-in on progress, see how the team is improving. It is not good enough to seek feedback from the team every twelve months, or even six months – doing them regularly helps catch issues early, and also helps in other ways – the team’s communication and understanding should also improve.
