AGILE BOX RETROSPECTIVE

Keep your agility alive within your organization.

Running retrospective meetings regularly to improve your agility within your teams is an opportunity to take it to the next level whether it’s mindset, culture, values or methodology…

With this article, I would like to discuss with you guys a practice I run with all teams once in a while to get them to share what practices work well and what should be improved or banned to be more agile.

You can use this format to run regular Scrum Retrospectives too.

This is the timeline I recommend to use if you’re facilitating a group of 8 or 10 participants, but it’s susceptible to change based on context, group size or teams’ maturity.

1. Set up (objective & icebreaker) -15 minutes
2. Open question (sharing feelings) -20 minutes
3. Agile Box exercise (gathering data & insights) -45 minutes
4. Actions (decide what to do) -30 minutes
5. Close the retrospective -10 minutes

1. Set up (objective & icebreaker)

First things first! Choose a fun icebreaker and start the retrospective with a positive note. Candy Love is a colorful and fun icebreaker that I sometimes use to get participants to talk about things they love beyond work and feel comfortable sharing.

Here is how you can run the activity :

Empty a package of colorful candy (M&Ms) into a bowl or a jar, then ask participants to pick a candy from the bowl (or jar) and then share something about themselves based on the candy color :

Yellow: Family

Red: Hobby

Blue: Book or movie

Green: Pets

Orange: Food

Brown: Bonus (talk about anything)

Keep it short and sweet! (credit goes to http://www.funretrospectives.com/candy-love/)

It’s important to explain the purpose of holding this retrospective to all participants. You can either do it before or after the icebreaker.

2. Open question (sharing feelings)

Once you have established trust and openness, you can run a check-in exercise to measure participants’ emotions about agility within the organization by asking the following question “Are we agile enough ?”. Make sure all participants understand what this question means actually! Does it mean if we are Agile enough, we don’t need to take it to the next level? Absolutely not! This simply means that every time we ask this question is an opportunity for us to improve and gain in maturity.

Here is how you can run this exercise :

Draw a horizontal line, write numbers from one to five and ask participants to mark where they think their thoughts best fit in and explain why they felt that way. It’s good to timebox this exercise, so no more than 2 minutes per person.

Open question (sharing feelings)

1- Not Agile

2- Slightly Agile

3- Moderately Agile

4- Very Agile

5- Extremely Agile

Problems and actions shouldn’t be discussed at this point of the exercise, the focus is on the participants’ current thoughts. Thank all participants for sharing their feelings and move on to the next exercise.

3. Agile Box exercise (gathering data & insights)

Ask participants to imagine all agile practices, activities, values… adopted within their teams in a closed box. Then ask them to open the box and discuss the following :

Which activities should be added to the box?

Which activities should be removed?

What to keep/recycle?

You can split a board into three areas according to the three questions above, ask participants to write their ideas on post-its and share them with the group.

Agile Box exercise (gathering data & insights)

Once everyone has put their thoughts on the board, ask them to group ideas into categories and suggest a title for each category.

4. Actions (decide what to do)

For each group, ask participants to identify specific actions and make sure that the group has a shared understanding of what was suggested.

Next, ask the group to choose what actions and topics they want to put in place first through a Dot Voting session. Give participants 3 votes and each one can choose where to put his or her votes.

Actions (decide what to do)

5. Close the retrospective

To close the retrospective, you can ask participants to write down on post-its one thing that will help you improve the retrospective experience for them.

Things that work right are working for now but may change if you find a more effective way of working/operating. You should allow yourselves to experiment with new ways of working, fail fast, iterate if required and recover faster. By doing so, you will acquire the right attitude of continuous improvement within your organization.

keep your agility alive and thriving.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found my first writing useful, let me know if you think it was :) and do not hesitate to share with me your thoughts and leave a feedback.

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