Introduce new elements into your retrospective meetings
The following activities can become a part of your next agile retrospective. You don’t have to introduce all of them, but give at least one or two a try.
Remind people of the goal behind a scrum retrospective
Retrospectives can easily turn into gloomy complain-fests. You might think that it’s not a bad thing: it’s an occasion to talk about the bad stuff as well. That’s true, but the meeting should result in a set of action items that will significantly improve your team’s processes. If it’s just an hour (or three hours) of complaining, the improvement is not likely to happen.
Yet another vital element of a successful retrospective is to make sure that the meeting is blameless. Sure, people are encouraged to speak their minds, but it doesn’t mean that they should point fingers. After all, the goal is to come up with constructive improvement ideas. This is not always easy to achieve, especially when the scrum retrospective is organized after an unpleasant incident during the sprint (software outage or team conflict).
How do you make sure that your team keeps these rules in mind? You can reiterate them as you start the retrospective, or you can use visual reminders: posters or sketchnotes that remind team members about the nature of this meeting.
Perhaps your team will be inspired by the words of the Prime Directive:
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review
Monitor your team’s well-being at the start of your retrospective
Checking how your team feels is useful for the meeting facilitator, but it’s also an excellent ice breaker at the beginning of the agile retrospective.
Use a flipchart, a whiteboard, or sticky notes to represent people’s moods visually. Ask them to display their feelings with emoji or make a scale on which they can place themselves. It will help you to read the room during the retrospective. If you collect this kind of data regularly, you can uncover interesting patterns.
Change the facilitator
If you’re the person that always leads retrospectives, things may get a little repetitive for the participants. One of the retrospective ideas that teams find effective is to ask different people to facilitate at least a part of the meeting. It allows other people to get involved, dig a little deeper into the theory behind retrospectives. Your new facilitator might come up with ideas for in-meeting exercises that invigorate the whole team.
Utilize quantitative metrics
As a Project Manager or a team leader, you have access to reports filled with valuable insights into your team’s performance. It is a good idea to share them with your retrospective participants. They will learn important facts, and you can base the whole discussion on both: qualitative feedback and quantitative data.
What kind of data can you use?
- Project burndown chart: you can find it in your project management tool (e.g., Jira)
- The comparison of planned hours and actual hours or the overtime report: these can be generated in Teamdeck, your resource management solution.
Use these ideas for retrospectives to breathe a new life into your team meetings
We hope that this guide provides you with retrospective ideas that can work for your project. Whichever ones you choose, remember that in order to get your team on board with new initiatives, it’s best to give them insights into the goals of these actions. When they know why you’re doing it, they’ll be more likely to follow through and perhaps even contribute to your retrospective toolset with their own ideas.