Micro-sprint: Retrospective
Using reflections to continually improve the Micro-sprint process
The Retrospective is one of the four key events in the Micro-sprint (if you don’t yet know what a Micro-sprint is, you can read more about that here). It is the final and (most likely) the shortest event of the Micro-sprint but despite this, its importance should not be underestimated. The Retrospective is key to the success of a sprint as it allows the team space to reflect on the sprint process and plan for improvements in the next sprint.
So how does the Retrospective work?
Within a Micro-sprint, around 10% of the overall time is dedicated to the Retrospective (about 20 minutes in a 3-hour session) so the Retrospective needs to be short but focussed. Therefore, we have designed our Retrospective so that it asks the team to reflect on two key questions:
- What went well?
- What didn’t go so well?
The purpose of this is to help the team understand what went well in the process so that we can continue doing those things in the next sprint, and what didn’t go so well so that we can make changes in the next sprint so that it is more enjoyable and productive.
Putting the reflections into action
From a teaching and learning perspective, building in opportunities for reflection within a project and acting upon those reflections each week has been invaluable to improve the process and promote openness and transparency within the team. The use of Airtable (you can read more about the tools we use to support the Micro-sprints here) to collect these reflections quickly has streamlined the process of giving and collating feedback.
In our first project developing an open-access course on antibiotic resistance, we were able to make continual improvements to the process throughout the project. For example, one sprint involved a lot of discussions. Although the discussions went well, and we achieved the sprint goal, the reflections told a slightly different story:
‘Need to encourage more discussion and people shouldn’t feel afraid to contribute answers’
‘Could be more discussion with everyone!!’
‘Some team members were very quiet’
Based on these reflections, we opened a new channel of communication on Slack for quieter team members of the team to contribute their opinions online as a back-channel to the main conversation. Immediately, the changes were reflected in the following sprint’s Retrospective:
‘Lots more contribution!! Almost everyone contributed I think.’
‘Everyone was involved and discussing the activities.’
This example demonstrates the effectiveness of the Retrospective to make changes quickly and continually improve processes.
