Improving your working practices and office communication with retrospectives

A ‘retrospective’ is a commonly used tool in software development. A team will get together to review how successful the previous week or two has been, collaborate to suggest ways of improving their working practices, and then act upon them. At Spoke, we are a small in-house product development team working in the offices of LOD — our parent company — and have been using retrospectives to improve our working practices.

As a product manager who’s previously worked in the music streaming and educational gaming industry, it’s been a while since I have worked in an environment where most people don’t do regular retrospectives. Working with team members who are new to retrospectives reminds me how a culture of reflection and gradual improvement is important for team harmony and general workplace happiness.

It also gives a team of people who work closely together a forum to mention anything that has been bothering them recently without needing to pick a time to specifically ‘bring something up’ with a line-manager or another team member — which can unnecessarily push some outside of their comfort zone.

Retrospectives don’t seem common for businesses outside of the tech world, but I don’t see any reason why. Sure, there are post-project reviews and wash-up meetings, but these are rare and their impact is minimal. It is not something built into the culture of companies running such meetings.

A retrospective culture, if not in the exact format used by software teams, improves performance and makes teams happier by discussing problems openly and honestly, then doing something about it.

Do you know of any non-software teams who have regular retrospective-style meetings? How do they work? Let us know on Twitter!

For further reading, here are some good (though tech-focussed) resources on retrospectives:
Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
retrospectivewiki.org

Barry 
Product Manager, Spoke