How to Kick-Off A Simple Sprint Retrospective?
A Catalyst to Continuous Improvement
The Tinder of Improvement
If you ask me what is the most important thing in agile mentality, it is retrospective that matters.
I remembered I had written an introduction regarding sprint retrospective, but some junior scrum master might have no idea how to hold a sprint retrospective in a simple manner. Because they might have passed the agile certification but indeed they lack of practical implementation to help them gain the real experience of leading retrospective process.
In the Scrum framework, many individuals cannot differentiate sprint retrospective from sprint review, and some people might even declare merging them together in order to save time for development. That would not be the thing a scrum master would like to see.
Therefore, I’d like to show you how to start a sprint retrospective in a pragmatical manner. And most importantly, you don’t need to restrict it to scrum only. In fact, you could apply the process to any other agile methodologies to assist a team improve themselves, fostering an environment of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
What Is A Sprint Retrospective?
Before holding the ceremony, we have to clarify the definition of the event. And the scrum guide states it as below：
The Scrum Team inspects how the last Sprint went with regards to individuals, interactions, processes, tools, and their Definition of Done.
In its definition, a sprint retrospective is an event that inspects 4 aspects during the sprint: individuals, interactions, process, tools and definition of done. In conventional meetings, we are used to reviewing the progress, the requirements, the plan, or the “individuals”…
Well, most leaders ignore the importance of building a psychologically-safe environment that aids members to reveal some implicit problems that eliminate overall performance. And we need a ceremony to make it happen. I still remembered the scenario that my prior manager judged members’ progress without clarifying why it happened often, even he had pushed them a lot. That’s where a sprint retrospective could be added to support it.
In general, We are not accustomed to introspecting ourselves along some journeys, but inspecting others to hide real problem inside us, or the team.
Why Is It Important in Agile Transformation?
In my past experience, some members would challenge me that the event should be canceled because it consumes additional time for them to work on tasks. Some even thought the sprint review is the same as the sprint retrospective. And this would be a scrum master’s challenge to help members know the importance of its existence, and make it a habit of a team to improve themselves often till it becomes an embedded gene.
I’d like to you to jump out of the box of the agile methodologies. In fact, it has nothing to do with Agile but how you form a culture of team improvement. You must have the experience that some colleagues complain about impediments from their working patterns.
For example, my ex-colleague, John, had complained about not having a consistent deployment process such that there were many online issues happening when new features were released, and they had to spend additional time fixing issues, which made them hard to have free time. However, he never pointed out the issue or proposed solutions to refine it.
Well, the case is just a tip of the iceberg. I believe there would more than that from within your teams, right? And that’s why retrospective session is so important to reveal the bottlenecks that block a team from being self-organized and self-improved.
How to Kick Off A Simple Retrospective Session?
So let’s back the most critical topic — How to kick off a simple retrospective session? When I became a scrum master for the first time, I did not use any tools to intrigue the dialogues of the team, but reply on people’s discipline to reveal the problems in their development process.
But initially I found people might tend to reveal the defects on both processes and tools rather than the interaction and self-introspection. Maybe it was limited by our asian culture; individuals are used to reviewing external issues than internal one. And that was the phenomenon I saw.
When I came to a new team these days, I tried to think of a simple approach to improving the resistance from the members since I know a high performance team is built from inside out rather than outside in.
How to enable the transparency, inspection, and adaptation from an event?
- Draw a simple retrospective board
In order to enable the transparency in the beginning, I backed to the original definition of a sprint retrospective. As we are holding the session, we would ask questions like “What went well?”, “What went wrong?”, and “What should be kept?” during the sprint. And we would review 4 aspects mentioned above: individuals, interactions, process, tools.
Therefore I came up with an idea that I could prepare a retrospective board regarding the 3 questions plus a plan, and 4 aspects we’d like to review, as below.
On this board, the columns stands for the questions we ask. “Good” represents “What went well?”, “Bad” represents “What went wrong”, “Keep” represents “What should be kept?”, and “Plan” represents the improvement plan we brainstorm together to make our working environment better.
And then the rows indicates the aspects we’d like to think of. So it becomes a 4 X 4 matrix board that helps members visualize what should be exposed in this retrospective session.
- Lead a team to write down their observations
In my current team, not all but only small group of individuals had experienced sprint retrospectives. So I took some time to simply introduce the goal of the event and show them how to do this with sticky notes.
Simply speaking, they just need to write down what they observe during the sprint according to the categories in the matrix. Remember not to force members to fill all the grids but propose their viewpoints on the spot. Any ideas are encouraged and viewed as opportunities to improve the team.
In asian culture, we tend to discover badness instead of goodness, which could be shown in our board. And I would point out this to lead them to think from a different perspective — trying to dig out good factors from the environment. Transparency is the first step to “notify” members what is happening and make corresponding reactions.
- Review aspects column by column
And then I would lead them to review the contents of cards from left to right, top to down.
In the “Good” column, I would speak out the descriptions they write down, and propose my problems according to their contents, to drive more conversations among the team.
In this way they would be gradually aware of the goodness in the following sprints. And I found they are willing to share their viewpoints as I try to dig out some more deeper information. Building an environment of mutual sharing is a method to enable transparent messaging.
In “Bad” column, I would speak out the questions and ask them for improvement plans. In most time they would have had a plan in minds but they need a channel to express them and be emphasized. I would be an organizer to reach a compromise among their comments to write down the corresponding plans (green sticky notes), which should be taken into practice thereafter.
In “Keep” column, we would repeatedly indicate something we do well to highlight its existence and should be kept in the following sprints because that is highly associative to building a self-organized team. For example, flexibly communicating with each other to online issues. This part is important to keep everyone informed what should be kept as a team’s gene. It seems like discovering the motives that drive you doing something without being stopped.
- Put improvement plan into practice
After writing down the improvement plans, we have to put them into practice. The step is pretty critical since if you don’t implement this step, the team would come to know that the retrospective session is meaningless and gets resistant to it.
On the contrary, the team gets more proactive once their opinions are not only considered but also implemented to refine their performance. For example, the colleagues once complained about chaotic deployment process, so I myself formulated a deployment plan for them to abide by, and got positive feedback. The working atmosphere gets rewarded once individuals’ opinions are taken into account.
Coach’s Murmur
In my opinion, scrum masters or agile coaches don’t have to seek fancy ways to hold retrospective sessions but follow the fundamental definition. People tend to react to what you make transparent. We could inspect the dynamics in the session and make adaptations.
In the post I didn’t reveal any highly-skilled tools to make a retrospective meeting productive, but visualize the elements from its definition to lead members to think inside the frames I set for them. Is it simple, right?
Let Me Help You
Now I provide free, 1–1 online consulting service. If you have any agile related problems or project management issues, please reserve a web call with me. I would answer your questions as possible as I could.
👉 Book now: https://calendly.com/uragilecoach/consulting
🎁 Anyone who reserves for the web call would be rewarded with a secret gift that helps you grow on project management skills.
If you acknowledge the value I share with you, do as below:
1. 👏 the article
2. subscribe me for latest contents
3. follow me on other platforms for further information
- IG: @ur_agile_coach
- Podcast: Agile Rocket
- Youtube: Your Agile Coach
- LinkedIn: Tsung-Hsiang Wu
- Twitter: @ur_agile_coach
