5 Hacks For Every Scrum Master To Improve Their Retrospectives Today

Retrospectives are widely considered the most important agile sprint ceremony, but for many teams they are time-consuming, stressful and lead to little meaningful change within your team and organisation.

Because I believe every team can improve their retros, and fast, I’ve compiled a list of 5 ideas that you can easily explore as part of your next retro.

Each idea is tasked with making the retro more focused and productive, more engaging or more actionable — which should lead to the elusive continuous process improvement that all scrum masters desperately crave and most teams desperately need.

Please share your own ideas in the comments.

Change up your format

A quick shake-up of the retro format can increase engagement, create new types of conversation and generate new perspectives.

From classic formats like 4Ls (liked, learned, lacked, longed for) and Mad, Sad, Glad, to more visual, hands-on, or silly, a new format is a sure-fire way to get your team bringing their best.

Brilliant, free, resources like Fun Retrospectives, Retromat and this collaborative Trello board, have 100s of formats you can explore.

When reviewing the format, also consider who is invited. Could someone from outside your team or even company bring new insights or take ownership of actions agreed in your retro?

• Why not change the time of your retro? Is Friday, pre-pub drinks always a good idea?
• Why not change the location of your retro? Small team walking retro? Over lunch?
• Why not change the facilitator? You can finally get a day off.

Make it democratic

Oi loud guy! It’s time to share the spotlight.

It’s very easy for more extroverted and loud members of teams to dominate conversations and themes during retrospectives. These personalities also find it easier to raise difficult issues. This impacts the breadth of topics discussed, reduces perspectives, and can mean quieter team members simply stop caring about your retrospectives.

There are various techniques to encourage more introverted members to speak up. But consider changing your feedback process to make things more democratic. Some customers of Mindful Team tell us their teams are more open to share if the feedback is anonymous. Could you implement a process for anonymous feedback into your retrospective planning?

Come prepared

You and your team want a retrospective that’s productive, focused and doesn’t run over. Then the participants need to come prepared.

If you can have your team document their thoughts throughout the sprint, you have two great opportunities to improve your retrospective:

• Feedback reflects the whole sprint not just the last few days of it. Because when people reflect on the sprint after it’s over, their focus is universally on the thing that stood out in the last day or two.
• Feedback can be grouped before the retro. So you never have to hear the words “I think we’ve covered that already”. Grouping a topic can also act as vote for the topic and therefore can help with some basic prioritisation. A big time saver.

Follow through

If actions from retrospectives are not created, assigned and completed, your retrospectives are vanity meetings. They look good in the team calendar, sound sort-of productive, but are ultimately a massive waste of your team’s time.

Not focusing on actions is a guaranteed way to stop your team caring about the retrospective, and ensure continuous improvement remains a distant dream.

For actions to be effective, ensure they follow this checklist:

• Recorded
• Specific
• With a due date
• Assigned
• Followed up on (in the next retro)

Prove they work

As your teamwork improves, a warm fuzzy and productive glow should envelop your team. But if quantitative metrics are more your bag, consider introducing a way of measuring your team’s happiness from 1–10 on a regular basis.

As your cycle of retrospectives continues you should start to see this metric improve. A great way of highlighting the value of retrospectives to your team, to your boss, and — if you need it — to yourself.

Implement this change now, and then explore the other ideas discussed here, and you can even explore if your retrospective format changes have improved your team’s happiness ❤.

Mindful Team is on a mission to make 1,000,000 teams happier. Supercharge your retrospectives and add team health checks in seconds. Register free today.