Play: Retrospectives

Standing on the shoulders of giants, we borrow (steal) here from Agile retrospectives as well. But once again, we’ve adapted the technique to work for client project retrospectives as well.

When To Run the Play

Smaller retrospectives are run during the project in intervals. A larger retrospective is done soon after the project is completed when everything is still fresh in people’s minds.

Why run the play

To make continuous improvements in our craft after every project.

Rules

• Leave egos at the door, this is about the team and its output
• Full squad, leave no soldier behind
• Take the time to listen to each other, and respect each others opinion

How to run the play

Step 1: 3 Things That ‘Went Well’

Playbook Template: Project Retrospective

• Give everyone 3 minutes to write 3 things that went well
• When everyone is finished take 3 mins to group the post-its into similar points
• Then order the groups of themes. Do this by moving the post-its into groups and decide a theme title for each group
• Then order the themes by biggest impact > smallest impact with the biggest impact at the top of the board

Step 2: 3 Things That ‘Could Be Improved’

• Give everyone 3 minutes to write 3 things that needed to improve
• When everyone is finished take 3 mins to group the post-its into themes
• Then order the groups by biggest impact > smallest impact with the biggest impact at the top of the board

Step 3: Dot Voting

Everyone uses the priority dots to vote on the themes that they think are most important to the success of the project

• Give everyone 2 minutes to vote on their themes
• People can put multiple dots on 1 theme

Step 4: Actions

It’s important to ensure that actions are assigned as part of this Play. It’s the main point of it. Actions need to be agreed upon and assigned to people to execute to ensure we improve.

• Start with the most important thing to improve
• Agree on an action or set of actions that will ensure we improve that thing to the level we want
• Assign a person to execute that improvement
• Assign a specific project or space for them to execute that improvement

Step 5: Add Learnings To The Database

So that other teams can learn from this work as well, add each of the subject & action to the database [internal Signal Noise].