James Carr

This iteration marked another iteration of attending retrospectives with a twist… up until now I had guest facilitated other teams as well as my own team’s retrospectives, but this week I facilitated one team while someone else facilitated mine. Some interesting patterns arose, and I’ll delve into them a bit after describing the two retros.

For the team I facilitated, I decided to use the winning formula that my team had liked last iteration with some of the improvements they had suggested. This consisted of

• Setup/Agenda Overview
• Gather Data: Iteration Timeline
• Generate Insights: Patterns and Shifts
• Decide What To Do: Circle of Questions
• Wrap Up: Helped, Hindered, Hypothesis

This retrospective however had quite a different environment. Whereas this formula was used with great success wih a team of 6 and 1 customer joining over video conference, this one consisted of 6 developers, 3 on site customers from other departments in person, 3 customers joining over video conference, and 1 customer joining over the speakerphone. Quite a larger group, and the person joining over the speakerphone hung up quietly halfway through.

For the timeline I used color coded sticky index cards for Technology, People, and Organizational Related themes and things felt like they went pretty smoothly throughout this part and identifying the patterns and shifts. So far, so good… lots of good insight from the iteration gained!!!

Circle of questions, however, is where things got a little complicated… it took a full 17 minutes to complete a pass around the circle. A lot of good insight and goals were discussed, it just took a bit long to go around with so many people. I also integrated feedback from the last retro and allowed people a minute to respond to the answers. Looking forward, there’s two variations I’d like to try with Circle of Questions:

• Timebox Q&A to the point where it’s lightning fast… one minute per person!
• Split the group into two, perform the activity, then rejoin and discuss the hilights of both discussions

I wrapped the retrospective up with Helped, Hindered, and Hypothesis and got the following feedback:

• Helped
  • Facilitated Discussion and Opened Up Communication
  • Loved the circle idea… everyone got a chance to talk
  • Chronology of Events
• Hindered
  • Completely different format from last time
  • Too much time in deciding what to do phase
  • People got sidetracked during Circle of Questions
  • Not sure that everyone understood what the goals are
• Hypothesis
  • Should use more time for the larger number of people
  • State goal and purpose at the beginning of the meeting
  • Put more focus on repeating issues, less on new issues

For the hindered part, felt like I did state the purpose and goal by overviewing the agenda at the beginning of the retrospective, so I’m not quite sure how to improve on that… maybe it wasn’t solid enough? Ideas?

My Team

My team’s retrospective was facilitated by another team member that I helped setup the retro outline a bit. The format followed was:

• Set Up: Weather Forcast
• Gather Data: Mad / Sad / Glad
• Generate Insights: Patterns and Shifts
• Decide What To Do: Short Subjects
• Wrap Up: Appreciations

What I liked about this retrospective is that some very interesting and serious conversation got sparked about a very key part of our jobs… communication. After a lot of discussion, our decision during the goals stage was to put together a team radar outlining four areas we and the customers agree are vital to maintaining meaningful and useful communication. We’ll use this to track the following iterations to see how much we’re able to improve, which is interesting because there are now activities from the agile retrospectives book that need to follow this retrospective.

Only downside was time… the conversation got interesting and oozed out of our timebox and our facilitator was a little scared to cut people out and stop the conversation that needed to happen. Overall it was great though!

Patterns and Shifts

There’s some interesting patterns I’m beginning to observe since we’ve adopted practices from the agile retrospectives book:

• we’re starting to get more value out of our restrospectives
• we’re exposing gaps of value in our retrospectives to help improve them
• customers are showing up more
• Activities are beginning to flow more naturally… it’s hard to tell when one ends and the next begines
• Based on retrospective content, it seems best to follow up with a certain set of activities in the next retrospective

Overall it feels like we’re moving in the right direction and gaining great insight and improvement with the format we’ve adopted… and it’s great seeing the the activity evolve iteration from iteration.