Retrospective activities for teams that want to improve their processes and people.
RETROSPECTIVES! These are wonderful blessings in the production process, that allows the team to reflect on their performance for constant improvement. This post begs you to get a bit meta, and be retrospective on the way you handle retrospectives.
Different activities and discussions result in different outcomes. It can be a great relief to get the team together and air out our frustrations, but will a vent session be constructive? When you’re considering which approach you’ll take with retrospectives, think about what kind of results you want to get out of it. At Invoke we like to ensure that they are constructive, and produce action items owned by individuals on the team. We also pay attention to the needs of the project at that time — for example, do we need to improve our delivery process? Is the team having communication breakdowns? Or perhaps, are retrospectives becoming too repetitive to really be useful?
Pause for a minute and think about what problems you’re trying to solve with retrospectives. Below are some options you and your teams can use to reflect on your sprint work, and your team work.
Process-Oriented Activities
Keep, Start, Stop 👐 🏁 🛑
A keep, start and top meeting is very action-oriented. Unlike the other options, there are no conversations about feelings or interpersonal relationships. Each item generated will directly influence behaviour. The team will start doing something, they will stop doing something, or they will continue doing something until it becomes a dependable habit.
This sprint is good if you don’t have a lot of time, and want to focus on actions rather than process or people. It’s a good starting point if this is your team’s first sprint.
Recommended Materials:
- Sticky Notes
- 1 Laptop (For note taking)
- Sharpies (Enough for each team member to have their own)
- Timer for everyone to see
How to run it: Break out three distinguished columns…
- Keep — What did we do during this sprint, that we should continue to do?
- Stop — What did we do that wasn’t helpful to our work?
- Start — What would the team start doing to improve?
Spend 5 minutes writing in each column separately, taking suggestions from the group as a whole. This is a very crowd-sourced, and conversational retrospective method. At the end of the 5 minutes dedicated to a column, confirm that nothing was missed and move on. The retrospective should start with the ‘Keep’ column, so the team can feel confident and validated on actions they’re already taking!
The ‘Start’ column should directly answer the gaps that were raised in the ‘Stop’ column. Where possible, assign a specific person to complete the ‘Start’ items. If you find there are a lot of outcomes in each column, work as a group to prioritize 3–4 action items for the next sprint. This way, the team isn’t overwhelmed and has actionable focus.
4Ls 👍💡📭 🤔
It’s conducive to start the retrospective off on a positive note, focusing on what the team ‘Liked’ gets people’s minds collecting momentum required for the harder conversation on some of the more negative aspects of the meeting.
Recommended Materials:
- Sticky Notes
- 1 Laptop (For note taking)
- Sharpies (Enough for each team member to have their own)
- Timer for everyone to see
How to run it: Ask the team to go through each column, giving them 2 minutes to write on sticky notes. The columns are:
- Liked — What did you enjoy about this sprint?
- Learned — What did you learn during this sprint? (User Testing insight, new tool used, etc)
- Lacked — What could the team have done better?
- Longed for — what did the team wish they had during this sprint?
At the end of each focus column, designate an individual to read each of the sticky notes, and if possible, group them into themes. There are likely several similarities across the sticky note contents — make sure the note taker documents each of these points in the distinguished columns for reference.
4Hs 🤠 🖐 😊 🕊
Recommended Materials:
- Sticky Notes
- 1 Laptop (For note taking)
- Sharpies (Enough for each team member to have their own)
- Timer for everyone to see
How to run it:
Same as 4Ls but with different columns.
Personally, I like this one a little better as it has some more positive connotations in the wording.
- Hero — Who was your hero in the last sprint/iteration? Who went above and beyond for the team?
- Help — Looking back what help do you wish you had during the last sprint? What impact would it have had?
- Happy — What was the one thing that made you go home to friends or family saying you’d had a great day at work?
- Hope — What is the one thing you hope for in the next sprint/iteration that you or team don’t currently have?
People Oriented Activities
Jobs to be done (JTBD) 🗣
A facilitator of direct feedback for individuals and how they’re performing in their roles amongst the team. The purpose of this is to be constructive to the overall process and a great opportunity for kudos!
Recommended materials:
How to run it: Because we’re talking pointedly about people and their performance, it’s imperative this retrospective start out on a positive note. The structure should be as follows:
- As a developer, _____ did _______ really well. For example, I thought ________ was well done.
- As a developer, ______could do ______ differently. For example, I would have liked to see ______.
Adding the role in front of the person’s name adds an air of objectivity, and speaks more to the expectation of the job to be done, rather than the person directly acting on that job. Adding examples to where they did things well, or inversely, not so well, helps give more clarity to the specific scenarios they can improve on for next time. Vague feedback is never helpful.
360 Degrees Kudos 🔁
This is an excellent exercise for when the team needs to reflect on each other’s positive qualities as a team. If the sprint was particularly difficult, this is a nice way to boost morale when the obstacles of the sprint were somewhat obvious.
Recommended Materials:
- Sticky Notes
- 1 Laptop (For note taking)
- Sharpies (Enough for each team member to have their own)
- Timer for everyone to see
How to run it: Designate the order of participants from first to last. One at a time, each team member will receive dedicated time for praise.
Start the timer for 2 minutes, and for that period of time, have the team write down what they appreciate about the first individual. Once the timer is complete, have the team go around in a circle and read their notes. Change the teammate receiving feedback until everyone in the room has received kudos from the team.
BONUS POINTS: It’s called 360 degrees, so bonus points if your team sits in a circle to deliver the feedback and the person receiving the feedback sits in the centre!
Real-time feedback 💬
The most agile of retrospectives! This retrospective gives very deliverable, or specific-action feedback. This is usually best used after a client meeting, a big presentation or a workshop.
Recommended materials:
How to run it: At the end of the activity, save fifteen minutes to spend discussing with the team on how they felt the meeting went.
Establish a rating system (at Invoke, we rate everything out of 5 bananas) — based on the consensus of ratings, ask why people reached that number.
🍌🍌🍌/🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌
- Why was the rating so high?
- Were there things we did well, that we can repeat in the future for other projects?
- Why was it so low? Can we avoid making these mistakes again?
