Timeline Achievement Retrospective
This really is one of my favourite retrospectives to perform at the end of a quarter or year. Even though there is a healthy push to celebrate success more often I still find teams really enjoy taking time out to ‘look at the big picture they achieved’. In addition to the common Timeline Retrospective I personally encourage team members to add in a thank you to each other regarding particular events. Intra-team acknowledgement goes a long way to building affirmative collaboration for future events.
The purpose of the Timeline Retrospective is to gather data, discussion and action from events plus their impact over a selected time period.
How:
1. Agree Timeline Duration
2. Populate Timeline
- add events, colour coding according to your legend
- add your personal satisfaction during that even time
3. Discuss the sequences, what happened, thoughts, insights
4. Reflect on the data map
- achievements
- learnings done
- patterns occurring
- surprises we didn’t expect
- be sure to call out any thanks to each other
5. Summarise the team actions and add to the backlog
I always find there’s multiple benefits from this type of retrospective
- gives the team the opportunity to reflect on achievements, how they responded to events and to give thanks to each other
- visualising all the team has been involved in provides tangible context to the amount of work they have been involved in
- articulates what happens and what we felt / responded to the event. Being articulate about the two allows for individuals to express their point of view
- acts as a good milestone ceremony to mark a change in focus
- solicits team affirmed improvement actions
#retrospective #feedback #agile #teams