Effective Team Retrospectives

In my experience team retrospectives are the single most powerful practice to enable Kaizen, i.e. continual improvement process.

A well known and proven structure for conducting retrospectives is the one proposed by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen in their book “Agile Retrospectives - Making Good Teams Great”. It consists of five phases:

1. Setting the Stage
   Set the goal; Give people time to “arrive” and get into the right mood
2. Gather Information
   Help everyone remember; Create a shared pool of information (everybody sees the world differently)
3. Generate Insights
   Why did things happen the way they did?; Identify patterns; See the big picture
4. Decide What to Do
   Pick a few issues to work on and create concrete action plans of how you’ll address them
5. Close the Retrospective
   Clarify follow-up; Appreciations; Clear end; How could the retrospectives improve?

Corinna Baldauf, “What is a retrospective?”

I recommend conducting retrospectives on a regular basis. It requires a facilitator, pens, green and red sticky notes. I recommend timeboxing the workshop.

Setting the Stage

Retrospectives are about taking the time to take back and reflect the past — in order to learn from it and to improve the future. It’s important for a retrospective to be blameless. I recommend introducing, or reminding, participants to the “Prime Directive”, e.g. during first phase of the retrospective, when you set the stage.

The Prime Directive

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Norm Kerth, Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Review

Gather Information

I like to gather information in two rounds:

1. What is going well?
2. What would we like to improve?

What is Going Well

In the first round I hand out each participant 2, max. 3, green sticky notes. I then ask the participants to write down things that went well since the last workshop, 1 thing per sticky note. I usually give the participants 5 minutes time to write the keywords on the green sticky notes. Then every participants presents his sticky notes by pasting them on a whiteboard and giving a short explanation.

The goal of this first exercise is to put your mind in a positive mood and start appreciating things that are working out well. Discussions are not allowed during this phase of the workshop.

People new to team retrospectives tend to find this exercise difficult.

What Would We Like to Improve

In the second part of the workshop I give each participant 2, max. 5, red sticky notes. I then ask the participants to write down things that they’d like to improve in the following weeks, 1 thing per sticky note.

Before starting I give the following advice:

1. Participants should write down things they want to improve. This is not to be confused with things that went badly. In this workshop you want to focus on improvement, on actionable things, no complaining, no blaming.
2. Improvements should be feasible with the time and means available to the team. You don’t want to talk about big changes that require you to ask management for funds. We focus on Kaizen, continual improvement, as opposed to Kaikaku, radical change.
3. Improvements should be feasible by the team itself. This exercise is not about asking others to change things.

Here again I usually give the participants 5 minutes time to write keywords on the red sticky notes. Then every participants presents her sticky notes by pasting them on a whiteboard and giving a short explanation.

Limiting the number sticky notes per person is important so that you can finish the workshop within a reasonable time and because you want to force the participants to choose the topics that really matter. Again, discussions are not allowed during this phase of the workshop. People usually find this part of the workshop much easier than the first part.

Generating Insights

After all the green and red sticky notes have been posted to the whiteboard. I start clustering them, i.e. grouping them together. This is an interactive process with the group. The clusters may consist of red and green sticky notes. The clusters will give you a visual clue of what topics are most relevant.

Clustered sticky notes after a team retrospective

Once clustered invite the team to discuss which of the topics should be taken care of in the next couple of weeks until the next retrospective. Always focus on things that are feasible within the available time and ressources. Remind the team that it will be their responsibility, and the team’s responsibility only, to implement those improvements.

Decide What to Do

In this part of the workshop it is important to agree on concrete tasks, responsibilities and deadlines. Focus on the most important tasks, less is more. It has to be clear to everyone, that implementing the agreed improvements is at least equally important as their daily work. Following through on these tasks is absolutely crucial.

I recommend documenting the output of the workshop in team Wiki and creating respective tickets in your Kanban board or in your task tracking tool.

I also recommend reserving 10% to 20% of the team’s working capacity for improvement tasks, on average.

Close the Retrospective

There are different ways to close a retrospective. I usually the participants to give a short feedback on the retrospective in just one sentence.

Inspiration

Retromat offers a wealth of different formats for conducting retrospectives on the basis of the five phases proposed by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.