Embrace efficient retrospectives!!!
“Agile retrospectives give power to the team, where it belongs!”
What is Retrospective?
It is one of the ceremonies in agile, which is held at the end of each iteration. It helps the team members to open up and present their views effectively and witness the following benefits gradually:
- Continuous Improvement
- Transparency
- Learnings
- Productivity gain
- Team Bonding
- Increased Customer Value
- Collaboration
- Ideation
Benefits?
Feedback is an essential part of every project, whether it is personal feedback or project feedback. It helps us evaluate our action items and rectify them. Over time, I have realised, the less we are active in inculcating feedback the more we are lost in our assumptions. Therefore, feedback helps us strengthen our confidence and improve our effectiveness.
Let’s now think of Retrospective on similar lines as our own performance feedback. It helps us identify how well we are doing as a team, as we pause and reflect on what transpired for us. Then we discuss what worked and what didn’t during a sprint or particular period of time of the project .i.e strengthening our confidence and improving the effectiveness of the team.
Frequency
The team decides the frequency of the retro. Generally, these are the major milestones that I have encountered:
- at the end of every sprint
- after every 2 weeks or monthly
- after every release
Problems
Most of us have at least once encountered a situation where we have delayed performing Retrospectives because some or the other team members would say,
“It consumes a lot of our time”
“We are too busy, let’s postpone the Retrospective next week”
“Let’s not spend time on Retrospective”
We faced the situation above in our projects too. However, sooner or later, because of delayed / irregular retros, we started facing the side effects:
- Lack of communication of problems which we were facing
- Reduced transparency within the team and issues kept hitting us like a fireball.
- Lack of Improvement
- Lack of learning from team members
- Frustrations with the project/team
- Dip in productivity as everyone was just an independent contributor within the team
If you notice, the problems are exactly what the Retrospective is meant to highlight and maybe solve. But still, in many agile teams, this remains as one of the ceremonies doesn’t get enough attention.
Solution
Since time was the biggest constraint, we time-boxed our retrospective to 15min. Surprised? Well, it’s no magic but a few things helped us to be super-efficient with this ceremony. Below are some pointers that worked for us:
- Getting Started:
We knew about the benefits of retrospective and hence as a team committed to making it more efficient. - Decide on its frequency:
As a team, we decided on a frequency and were committed to sticking to it. We scheduled a recurring invite so that no one in the team forgets about it. - Async activities:
We prepared the retrospective board well in advance so that people can put their points, vote on their points before the retrospective starts. This helped in reducing the sync time with the team. - Prioritise:
Rather than being over ambitious and discussing everything we collectively decided to discuss only the top 3–4 items and come up with the action items. - Action item ownership & timelines:
We made sure that no action items are left without an owner and without a defined timeline. - Review:
We made the action items visible by adding it to our sprint board (when we were working from the office) or adding it as a topic to our team slack group (when we started working from home). Every alternate day we spend 2 mins after the standup to review the action items.
Summary
By making our retrospectives more frequent, time-boxed and short (i.e. for 15 mins), it appeared as less of a burden to the team. We never skipped the retro and gained all the benefits of doing this ceremony by continuously making small and meaningful improvements.
In case you do not perform this ceremony, START NOW! If you have stopped it for any reason, make it more efficient and RESUME NOW!
You can check here for different types of ideas and choose a format that you think is best for your team.
Let me know your views and your ideas which you have discovered over the past and have helped you avoid the classic situation of “Let’s skip the retrospective”.
