Facilitating the Retrospective Meeting
Based on an article by Ben Linders
Retrospectives are a very popular technique in the collaborative world of Lean & Agile software development methodologies. It’s goal is continuous improvement from the team. The Agile Manifesto reads, “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”
Since Agile stresses the importance of continuous improvement, having a regular retrospective session is one of the most important Agile development practices. However, most teams underestimate the importance of the facilitator role. Not that he always needs to be the same person. What’s ignored is the fact that the facilitator needs to have some notions and a clear understanding of what we are looking for in a Retrospective and how to get to it. In this post we are going to discuss some key points to consider when facilitating a Retrospective Meeting.
The facilitator role:
The retrospective facilitator has to do everything to make sure that the retrospective session is a valuable one for the team. This includes:
- Planning the meeting and making sure that team members can attend (choose an appropriate schedule).
- Preparing the session. This means making sure the team has all the information necessary about the meeting and that they have anything they would need.
- Running the retrospective meeting effectively. Staying on track according to our goals.
- Guarding the culture in the room, creating a safe environment where people speak up. Even encouraging other team members to participate.
- Taking clear notes of the resulting action items. Making sure they are visible for everyone in the team and to do a proper follow-up.
The retrospective facilitator is responsible for getting to the root cause of the issues that will come up during the retrospective. As Luke Hohmann told us in this interview, the team will almost never give you the root cause of an issue right away. A team member will tell you their perceived issue: “Communication should improve”. But the real problem is underlying the surface. So we need to to dig a bit deeper to get the most out of Agile Retrospectives. As we have stated on this post, most of the time the problem with Retrospective is with the outputs.
Facilitator skills.
For these matters, the retrospective facilitator must have the proper skills to organize and lead the meeting:
- Excellent communication skills: Listen, ask questions, recap discussions.
- Servant leadership: Process focused, independent, supportive to the team.
- Maintaining an open culture: Encourage participation, manage conflict, give feedback.
- Goal-oriented: Planning and execution, able to adapt and improvise. Priority is the name of the game.
So, Who facilitates the retrospective? In most teams the Scrum master leads the retrospective, but it can just as easy be any other team member or even a Scrum master from another team. It can also be an agile coach, process responsible, quality manager, or even somebody from HR or a line manager; as long as they are all in line with the team goals. What matters is that the person can act as an independent facilitator and has the right skills.
Good Practices
To keep the retrospective effective, facilitators should focus on the following:
- Establishing an open and honest culture in the meeting.
- Making sure that all team members participate in the meeting.
- Making sure that the team establishes a shared understanding of how things went.
- Helping the team to decide upon the vital few actions that they will take.
Another thing to consider is to use the prime directive to establish a culture where team members speak up and will be open and honest. It sets the assumption that team member did the best they could possibly do.
Retrospective facilitators must be able to deal with negative issues that come up during the session. Help the team focus on the issue at hand, and understand them and don’t blame any team members for what has happened. For retrospectives with remote or distributed teams, facilitators should be able to make communication issues explicit and visible, keep everyone involved and a good meeting culture. A facilitator should not lead them based on their own opinion on what the team should do.
If you are in a transition to #Agile methodologies, then you might find that using a tool is very helpful when running a retrospective. Yout might want to try our own Retrospective For Confluence tool, or visit SoftwareDevTools for more tools for your remote #Agile team. You’ll even have a chance to try out a cool slackbot.
Learn more about ‘How to improve Agile Retrospectives’, ‘Tips for great retrospectives’, ‘How to adopt scrum in your team’, ‘How bots support collaboration’, and more great topics and posts on leadership, remote work, and overall Agile product development. Follow us on our Medium, Twitter and FB.
