Time Travel Your Sprint
Getting bored with the format for your Sprint Retrospectives?
Timeline your Sprint and collect useful insights to improve team performance.
No requirement for a fancy DeLorean time machine, just some key messages from Doc Brown to support the technique…
A Frequently Used Format…Useful But Can Become Monotonous
The Three Question Retrospective format consists of asking the team members to describe, what went well, what didn’t go so well, and identify where improvements can be made in the Sprint they’ve just worked on. This format also allows for continuous improvement to flow into the next Sprint, however, it can get repetitive.
After the same three questions are answered by the team in a series of Retrospectives, this Scrum ceremony can become a ritual, where one Sprint blurs into the next, the team can lose interest and the quality of insights may also reduce over time. In my experience, this can happen with a team that’s been together for a while, working on the same product. The result is that takes longer for the team to get better at what they do, possibly impacting the quality of releases, losing opportunities to add business value, and repeating the same mistakes.
As a Scrum Master, I look to introduce variety whenever I can into the retrospectives. I try and do this regularly so that my team can be re-energized and we can take the data generated to bring a fresh set of achievable improvements and collective team wisdom into the next Sprint.
Constructing the Timeline
What You’ll Need
1. Coloured post-it notes and markers
2. A whiteboard/ large wall or window
3. If your team is operating in a virtual setting, you can use the Miro or Mural interactive whiteboards online.
The Group Activity
- Set the stage and explain the style of Retrospective that you’ll be taking the team through.
- Use a color-coded approach as per the mock-up below, to chart the good events, the problematic events, and any significant events that occurred during the Sprint.
- Each team member uses the post-it notes to mark key events on the top half of the timeline.
- Include events such as support/production incidents that may also impact the team.
- Encourage the team not to restrict themselves to work-related events. Now that we’re all venturing back into the social scene safely again, your team may want to meet up at the office for 1–2 days a week and have a team lunch or take part in an online fitness drive together, whilst they’re working from home.
6. Once the key events have been identified, invite the team members to plot how the events made them feel in the bottom half of the timeline to add another dimension to your observations.
7. The team can use either the dot voting method as shown above, or they can draw a single line from the start of the timeline to the end, to indicate their positive or negative feelings towards the events as indicated by the emojis. See below:
Getting a measure of the team members’ emotional state gives the team an additional data dimension and will reveal where there may have been points of frustration, additional stress placed on the team as well as gladness over challenges overcome.
3 Scenarios Where I’ve Found The Timeline Technique Useful
1. When a Sprint has been a period of extreme focus or challenges with a lot of events occurring, and I want to give the team an opportunity to take a full inventory of the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘when’ of the past Sprint.
2. When multiple teams are working together from different organisations and I’ve wanted to capture how all parties worked towards achieving a shared outcome for a client.
3. Dynamic projects with high team member turnover.
Great Scott! Now what?
As a team, you can now make observations on the timeline you’ve created and have a more insightful dialogue. For instance, if there is a cluster of problematic events, you may want to facilitate a team discussion to surface the underlying cause for those events, understand how or if they were overcome. At the same point in the timeline, you’ll want to see how the team’s emotional state is represented. Further discussion may uncover that the team’s morale remained high as they were growing by finding workarounds for the problems/impediments and their progress didn’t grind to a halt.
In my own practice of this technique, particularly working with remote teams, overlaying the emotional state can also serve to sound the S.O.S for those team members who just got on with delivering during the Sprint, but were not vocal regarding the challenges they experienced or didn’t reach out for additional support they needed. As a result, I’ve created more informal opportunities for teams to come together online to discuss support needed or just to engage in a general chat that we were all used to having in our office coffee points, not so long ago!
One of the benefits I’ve noticed from this Retrospective technique, is that it allows teams to immerse themselves in different perspectives that they themselves have created, from a single timeline. It’s not only the shared problems that bring the team together. Including the emotional ‘barometer’ also puts the team in a more empathic mindset. As the team identifies more avenues for growth and improvement, they have a better understanding of each other and can move towards the next Sprint with a renewed sense of collaboration.
Make Something Happen
Once you’ve tried the timeline format and hopefully had a high-energy session, celebrating your achievements, identifying areas for improvement, as well as taking part in some cathartic unloading, it is vitally important to agree on which actions you’ll take forward into the next Sprint. In the following Retrospective, the team can measure the impact of the improvements, and determine if they were able to realize the benefits of those actions.
How will you know if the team has enjoyed using this format?
Try this idea…Put up a scale of 1–10 on the whiteboard (physical or virtual) and ask the team to leave you feedback at the end of the session. Ask them to place a post-it note against the scale. (1 = Didn’t enjoy that format, let's never do it again! 10 = Loved the format, we could use it again). Ask the team to explain why they enjoyed/didn’t enjoy the format and capture any improvements they’d like to see and you’ll have some qualitative feedback to inform the format of your next Sprint Retrospective!
