Feed the feedback loop: An additional phase to make your iteration retrospective more productive
I’ve been working as a software developer in so-called agile environments for the last 10 years or so, and am the founder of Retrolution a tool to help retrospective facilitators. I’ve experienced organization applying scrum by the book and some much less structured process. I came to the conclusion that the single most important meeting for a product oriented team is the retrospective meeting. I recently became retrospective facilitator and use in iteration retrospective an additional phase to the classical 5 phases retrospective format. I call it ‘Feed the feedback loop’. Here what it is, and why you may want use it.
RetroWhat?
If you are not familiar with retrospective meetings, let me try to explain the concept behind them.
A retrospective meeting is a collaborative meeting whose ultimate goal is to improve working conditions and delivery of a group of people working more or less together and aligned toward the same objectives.
This meeting can take place regularly for teams following an iterative process, but also after an important event such as a project release, longer iteration such as a quarter-end, or a missed deadline.
The goal of the meeting is to learn from the past period (Hence the term Retro), and for the team to decide and commit to a list of actions in the next iteration. The actions are decided by the team to reduce or solve an issue, pain point or encourage a behavior.
To be useful, it is commonly accepted that actions have to be SMART, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely. To be accurate, the meaning of acronyms changes somewhat over time and context. For classical meetings, I would tend to keep the original word behind the A, which stands for Assignable. For retrospective meetings, it might be harder to assign an action to a specific person, as we might decide on a collective change.
Retros are meta
Retrospective meetings, as presented in the Agile Retrospective: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen follow a five phases structure. The fives phases are :
- Set the stage
- Gather data
- Generate insight
- Decide what to do
- Close the retrospective
In the last phase, ‘Close the retrospective’ we often do the retrospection of the retrospective meeting itself.
Retro of the retro? pretty Meta, right?
The idea is to gather feedback from participants to improve following retrospectives. This serves both a practical purpose — as it will help the facilitator to better adapt the next retrospectives to the team — and an educational purpose — as it shows the participants that the retrospective format can be adapted to other topics and that everything can be improved.
Iterations Retrospectives are about iteration and continuous Improvement
One common misconception about the retrospective meeting is its main focus. The goal of the retrospective is not to focus on the past, but to learn from the past to improve the future.
As Aristotle wrote in his 350 B.C.E book “Nicomachean Ethics” :
No one deliberates about the past, but about what is future and capable of being otherwise.
We already know that our actions must be SMARTs and that everything can be improved. Moreover, actions are decided based on a goal.
When working with short iterations, (anything between 1 day to 1 month), it is clear that :
- every iteration should not bring dramatic changes
- the short iteration period make it easy to learn
Also, when engaging in retrospective activities, it should be clear that the iteration process is not only about the product but also the process and the people.
To build on top of these considerations, it is good to consider certain actions as experiments. During the next iteration, the team will try to implement the experimentation. By definition, one experiment has to be evaluated. Then the results will be controlled, and the experimentation may be extended, adapted or stopped.
This is what this addition to the traditional 5 phases structure is all about: checking the status and outcome of previous actions in order to have a team decision regarding a potential follow-up.
I call this step ‘Feed the feedback loop’ because this is really what is it all about. It allows you to start the discussion with things that have been planned and implemented previously and allows you to check how they have worked in practice and adapt them.
Don’t get me wrong: this is not a novel idea and has been discussed by others with different names such as Retrospective Follow Up, Evaluate action outcomes, or described in Action Focused Retrospectives. Despite these articles, I think it deserves more visibility and to be integrated into all iterations retrospectives.
Phase or activity?
We introduced the ‘Feed the feedback loop’ concept for iteration retrospective but haven’t yet been descriptive about it.
One of the questions that deserved to be asked is whether this is a retrospective phase or an activity. I would say it can’t be defined as an activity because it’s is kind of limited in scope and does not play well with other activities.
On the other end, it is kind of a big deal to theorize a new phase in the retrospective process and may seem frightening to escape the well-known 5-phases structure.
Some people like to imagine it and integrate it in the initial ‘Set the stage’ phase. Other facilitators think it belongs to the fourth ‘Decide what to do’ phase since the team will decide at the end decide what to do with the experiments.
Finally, some will say that there is no point in making a follow-up point on actions. Their arguments could be that important issues will emerge on their own, or more accurately will be recalled by participants: it is not the facilitator’s job to bring up issues. I can only disagree with them.
The facilitator job is to make sure the team learns as much as they can, that they adapt over time, and also to make the better usage of the time allocated for the retrospective .
Having 5 to 15 minutes (or around 10%) dedicated to ‘Feed the feedback loop’ will allow you to quickly browse through important topics and will usually free up time for other topics during other phases of the retrospective.
Feeds the loops to make sure it starts and never end
In a second article, I will explain how I prepare and animate this new stage of the retrospective, but let me explain two essential aspects.
First of all, you want to think of it as a retrospective phase. I do it between the ‘Set the stage’ and ‘Gather data’ phase. Thinking of it as a phase will help you take the time it deserves, and also to think of it not as a defined activity, but as a phase with a goal. Depending on the team and the context, you will adapt the content and activity of the phase. And because this is a phase, you don’t have to stick to focus exclusively on the previous actions. You can, for example, bring as a subject recent changes or events that occurred.
Secondly, you want to consider each point discussed as a mini-retrospective: you want everybody to be knowledgeable of the discussed items, gather data on the results, generate insight on them, and finally decide what to do with them.
Of course, from time to time, the item would require a longer discussion and we cannot stick to the original schedule. It is your role as a facilitator to detect and decide whether you want to stick to your original plan or change your retro completely and focus on that item. Depending on the activities you’ve planned for the other parts of the retro, an option is to write the item on a paperboard, and add it to the items later discussed in the ‘Generate Insight’ phase.
Conclusion
As a retrospective facilitator, your job is to make the retrospective meeting the most useful for the participants. By adding the extra ‘Feed the feedback loop’ phase to your retrospective, you will help the team keep track of their previous experimentation and decide what to do with them. You will bring the iteration process to a new level. As always with retrospectives, take some time to reflect on it and adapt it to what you think is best for the team, the context and your knowledge.
