1.5 Close the Retrospective

Agile Retrospectives — by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen (10 / 72)

👈 1.4 Decide What to Do | TOC | Chapter 2 A Retrospective Custom-Fit to Your Team 👉

All good things come to an end, even retrospectives. End the retrospective decisively: don’t let people (and their energy) dribble away. Decide how to document the experience and plan for follow-up.

Help your team decide how they’ll retain what they’ve learned from the retrospective. Track new practices with posters or big visible charts. Use a digital camera or hit the Print button on that printing white board to create a visual record. The learnings belong to the team, and team members: not the coach, not the team lead, and not you as the retrospective leader. The team needs to own them.

Close the retrospective with an appreciation for the hard work everyone did both during the iteration and during the retrospective.

Before you end, take a few minutes to perform a retrospective on the retrospective. Look at what went well and what you could do differently in the next retrospective. “Inspect and adapt” applies to retrospectives, too.

Using this structure — Set the Stage, Gather Data, Generate Insights, Decide What to Do and Close the Retrospective — will help your team do the…